It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

‎"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

When the individual feels, the community reels.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.

Good action and thoughts produce consequences which tend to neutralize, or put a stop to, the result of evil thoughts and actions. For as we give up the life of self (and note that, like forgiveness, repentance and humility are also special cases of giving), as we abandon what the German mystics called "the I, me, mine," we make ourselves progressively capable of receiving grace. By grace we are enabled to know reality more completely, and this knowledge of reality helps us to give up more of the life of selfhood - and so on, in a mounting spiral of illumination and regeneration.

Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.