A promise must be about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling a certain way.

And so take away his work, which was his life [. . .] and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?

Human intellect is incurably abstract.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century [...] lies where we have never suspected it [...] The only palliative is [...] by reading old books. [...] the books of the future would be just as good [...], but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.

Friendship is born at that moment when a single particular person claims to a different: 'What! You far too? I assumed I was the only real one particular.