I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.
The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
It is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are the most grown-up.
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
