Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.

Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might suppose.

The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success.

I expect you have seen someone put a a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened; and then you notice a tiny steak of flame creeping along the edged of the newspaper. It was like that now.

The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other...

To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, not from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees.

No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly