God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.

There is something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there's also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefor, when it falls, a fiercer devil.

The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain.

It was a full moon and, shining on all the snow, it made everything almost as bright as day -- only the shadows were rather confusing.

The action of Pity leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It changes darkness into light and evil into good. But it will not, at the cunning tears of Hell, impose on good the tyranny of evil. Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world's garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses.