The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' [everything]. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.

To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.

It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult.

Sainthood lies in the habit of referring the smallest actions to God.