The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.

The devil loves 'curing' a small fault by giving you a great one.

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.