Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends - comrades - do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed.

I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.

In silence and in meditation on the eternal truths, I hear the voice of God which excites our hearts to greater love.

You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better - the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read.

It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It's not the sort of comfort they supply there.

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.