The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard.
If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain.
I wish we didn’t live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.
The Christian has a great advantage over other men, not by being less fallen than they, nor less doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that he is a fallen man in a fallen world.
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them.
You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the univerise in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.
Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease?
The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don’t.
The absent are easily refuted.
Other than heaven, the only place where one’s heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell.
If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.
Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.
When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love.
After an error you need not only to remove the causes but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an ‘undoing’ is required.
All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt – even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called.
When we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.
Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.
I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it.