Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion. It has, and it's taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred text. A sacred ...
You must not suppose that this was a romantic passion. The passion of my life, as the next chapter will show, belonged to a wholly different region. What I felt for the dancing mistress was sheer appetite; the prose, not the poetry, of the Flesh.
I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be ve...
The literary man re-reads, other men simply read.
Divine punishment are also mercies.
Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.
It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.
... "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked". The Christians describe the Enemy as one "without whom Nothing is strong". And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in ...
Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure.
He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true' or 'false', but as 'academic' or practical', 'outworn' or 'contemporary', 'conventional' or 'ruthless'. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying ...
In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.
I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been born in God's thought, and then made by God is the dearest, grandest, and most precious thing in all thinking." This is a prayer of co...
and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.
Oh, come on, Pole, buck up. After all, it is an adventure.
Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.
But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the sce...
They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this? I don't mean that I fear the worst of all. Nearly her last words were, 'I am at peace with God.' She had not always been. And she never lied. And she wasn't ...
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.
