The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things.

I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality. . . asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

Our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.

When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.