We who have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous of our being which we owe to authors.
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the old Christian rule is, “Either marriage, with completely faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.”
Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life.
Pleasure that is its own pursuit is always bad pleasure.
To get even near humility, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.
He produced mainly three results: Hatred, Terror, Adoration.
Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it.
If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?
Christianity has not message for those who do not realize they are sinners.
When you go to church you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends.
It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.
Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.
We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
God is not an optional extra, He’s an absolute must!
If you never take risks, you’ll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.
You can give the Devil too much or too little attention.
I have been feeling very much lately that cheerful insecurity is what our Lord asks of us.
The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They’ll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don’t you worry.
We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.
We cannot fully understand the relations of time and choice until we are beyond both.