I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different...
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!
Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.
The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.
The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.
Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.