The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them.

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.

If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing-rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.

We treat our dogs as if they were "almost human": that is why they really become "almost human" in the end.

We must beware of the Past, mustn't we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved.

The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said