The human mind is generally far more eager to praise or dispraise than it is to describe and define.

If conversion makes no improvements in a man's outward actions then I think his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.

Because we love something else more than this world, we love even this world more than those who know no other.

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't.

You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred - like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.