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.

That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal sufferring, "No future bliss can make up for it" not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.

I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was "Feed my sheep", not "Try experiments on my rats", or even "Teach my performing dogs new tricks".

What one must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation.

To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

A man's physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.

Joy is the serious business of heaven. Our merriment must be between people who take each other seriously.