The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil’s whole structure away.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.

There are no ordinary people.. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did.

Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes