We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect but how we should pray being as we now are ... It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.

Adventures are never fun while you're having them.

Friends are like coals in a fire - together, they glow; apart, they grow cold.

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

When we are wholly His we will be more ourselves than ever.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?