If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing-rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this.

The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.

All schools both here and in America should teach far fewer subjects far better.

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.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.