The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past.

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.

Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.

We only learn to behave ourselves in the presence of God.

Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.

The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.

Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.