Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life.

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.

I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't.

Provocation doesn't make me ill-tempered: it only shows me how ill-tempered I am.

A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.