We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument...Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

If you never take risks, you'll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.

The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.

Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

At the end of all things, the blessed will say, 'We never lived anywhere but in heaven.'