Sainthood lies in the habit of referring the smallest actions to God.
Once in our world, a Stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.
If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it’s not so bad.
He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.
Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.
One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.
Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.
Nothing is really ours until we share it.
If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.
If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.
If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.
With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.
Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many...
Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.
Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places.
Good and evil increase at compound interest. That’s why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance.
We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.
The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.