When you aim for perfection, you discover it’s a moving target.
Until you know that life is interesting – and find it so – you haven’t found your soul.
I have asked myself once or twice lately what was my natural bent. I have no doubt at all: It is to look at each day for the evil of that day and have a go at it, and that is why I have never failed to have an acute interest in each morning’s letters.
My feelings are those of a schoolboy getting in sight of the holidays. Or more seriously, my feelings are perhaps those of a matador who has decided not to enter the bull ring.
In one sense what may pass between the pope and myself may be trivialities. In another sense the fact of talking trivialities is itself a portent of great significance. But the pleasantries which we exchange may, as one church leader said, be pleasantries about profundities.
I say to you Baptists, “Go on being good Baptists, thinking that you are more right than anybody else.” Unless you think it, I have no use for you at all. The Church of England does precisely the same itself.
There are only two kinds of people in the modern world who know what they are after. One, quite frankly, is the Communist. The other, equally frankly, is the convinced Christian. The rest of the world are amiable nonentities.
The longer I live, the more convinced I am that Christianity is one long shout of joy!
In cities no one is quiet but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet but few are lonely.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes. Man’s ultimate responsibility is to God alone.
The long and distressing controversy over capital punishment is very unfair to anyone meditating murder.
Who knows whether in retirement I shall be tempted to the last infirmity of mundane minds, which is to write a book.
I hope that by going to visit the pope I have enabled everybody to see that the words Catholic and Protestant, as ordinarily used, are completely out of date. They are almost always used now purely for propaganda purposes. That is why so much trouble is caused by them.
Once you start, there is no end to who is to go in and who is to be left out.
There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions-a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude.