When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?

Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.

Man must endure his going hence.

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

Joy bursts in our lives when we go about doing the good at hand and not trying to manipulate things and times to achieve joy.

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.

Provocation doesn't make me ill-tempered: it only shows me how ill-tempered I am.