 A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. |
| The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil. |
| This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted. |
| The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not. |
| Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. |
| Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ. |
| Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. |
| You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. |
| Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time. |
| Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. |
| You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me. |
| Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. |
| Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. |
| God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. |
| The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. |
| A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell. |
| If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. |
| No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. |
| Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. |
| How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete. |
