if anyone present wishes to make me the subject of his wit, I am very much at his service--with my sword--whenever he has leisure.

When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, "hullo! i'm growing up." It is only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up.

He (the devil) always sends errors into the world in pairs--pairs of opposites...He relies on your extra dislike of one to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

We have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

You cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely

I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to "rejoice" as much as by anything else