Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.
Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time.
The present is the only time in which any duty may be done or grace received.
I am in love and out of it I will not go.
We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.
From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it.
Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.
It matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth.
We only learn to behave ourselves in the presence of God.
Don’t think of God in terms of forms, because forms are limited and God is unlimited.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.
I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one.
Christian love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.
We may think God wants actions of a certain kind, but God wants people of a certain kind.
Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.
God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain.