I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating.

You can't go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.

If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.

I cannot speak for the way God deals with others; I only know how he deals with me personally.