It is in their ‘good’ characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.
As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element.’
When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary.
No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights.
The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.
The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.
It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.
So many things – nay every real thing – is good if only it will be humble and ordinate.
If there is equality it is in His love, not in us.
Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.
The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost.
God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions – to Christ.
In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.
For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being.
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies – those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.