Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience.

I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't.

You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred - like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.

We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.