We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

You can't go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.

There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline , and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, . . . they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.

If God thinks this state of war in the universe is a price worth paying for free will--that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings--then we may take it it is worth paying.

I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

The man can neither man, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels.