When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective c...
The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have inven...
Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.
It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.
It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books...
There are far better things ahead than we leave behind.
If you are foe, we do not fear you. If you are friend, your foes will be taught the fear of us.
The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose, and that is to support the ultimate career.
Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny...
The world of 'broad-mindedness' and watered-down 'religion' is a world where a small number of people (all the same type) say totally different things and change their minds every few minutes.
If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it.
By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.
Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.
Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; th...
Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.
At the moment of death, the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of the raw material he was given at birth, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a goo...
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploi...
God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood i...
Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, ...
