My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.

Non-Christians seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity. No creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed. They that are whole need not the physician. Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.

The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man's outward actions – if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before – then I think we must suspect that his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.