The promise, made when I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love.

For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly.

Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' - or else not.

Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

If we only have the will to walk, then God is pleased with our stumbles.