If there is equality it is in His love, not in us.
Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.
The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost.
God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions – to Christ.
In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.
For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being.
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies – those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs.
Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.
Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased.
The human mind is generally far more eager to praise or dispraise than it is to describe and define.
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process. It needs not a map, but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop.
The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.
The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn’t stayed put and all has to be done over again.
Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved.
Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary.