We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain.

When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.

Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.

Agnostics talk cheerfully of man's search for God but they might as well talk about the mouse's search for the cat.

Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear