Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.
Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also.
Human intellect is incurably abstract.
The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.
There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.
The true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.
We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism – the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good.
Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.
Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God’s eyes; that is, in our deepest reality.
Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author’s control.
To play well the scenes in which we are ‘on’ concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us...
Hatred obscures all distinctions.
The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe.
The essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends...
The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success.
A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun.
In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.
Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.
We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.