What one must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation.

Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works.

I would prefer to battle the 'I'm special' feeling not by the thought, 'I'm no more special than anyone else,' by by the feeling, 'Everyone is as special as me.'

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

Even if there were pains in Heaven, all who understand would desire them.

The higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be.

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.