The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.

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.

If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

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.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

We live in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.