The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
Virtue – even attempted virtue – brings light; indulgence brings fog.
The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.
Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.
Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.
In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.
The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.
In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.
A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all – and more amusing.
It is always the novice who exaggerates.
Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.
And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to do another and harder and better one.
The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.
The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.
Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.
A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.