Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.

He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.

Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works.

There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was 'the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.'

We can conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of abuse of free will by His creatures: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when used as a weapon... But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and therefore, freedom of the will would be void.

A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.