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.

the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung.

Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.

You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.