You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.

No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.

I wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.

Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased.

When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft. Protestantism,in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being too much like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

We do not want to merely “see” beauty. We want to be united with it, to receive it into ourselves, to become part of it.