To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow’s end or the Greek Calends.
Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
Every poem can be considered in two ways – as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.
Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.
Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
People blush at praise – not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs.
To fight in another man’s armour is something more than to be influenced by his style of fighting.
If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.
Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.
The ‘frankness’ of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.
It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.
Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask.
If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?
Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.
An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath.
Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.
Though I do not believe that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.
We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness...
Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices.