The dogma of the Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity, and indeed, the most dramatic thing that ever entered the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment.
To subdue one’s self to one’s own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one’s self to other people’s ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.
A continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven’t got any of your own.
I know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the people who drew it up don’t understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it.
The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.
What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what’s the world coming to, eh?
The only Christian work is good work, well done.
She couldn’t have found anything nastier to say if she had thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.
There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom.
If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle.
Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.
The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.
What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?
In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job’s sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.
I have never regretted Paradise Lost since I discovered that it contained no eggs-and-bacon.
The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.
That you cannot have Christian principles without Christ is becoming increasingly clear, because their validity as principles depends on Christ’s authority.
To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.