Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.

Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing.

Something of God... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.