Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.

We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.

[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

Our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.