Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly – are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.
If our deepest desires cannot be satisfied in this world, then we must have been made for another world.
You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring into his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.
Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.
We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.