What the Church should be telling him [the carpenter] is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

The Devil ... is much better served by exploiting our virtues than by appealing to our lower passions; consequently, it is when the Devil looks most noble and reasonable that he is most dangerous.

But if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort — and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.

Fantasy works inwards upon its author, blurring the boundary between the visioned and the actual, and associating itself ever moreclosely with the Ego, so that the child who has fantasied himself a murderer ends by becoming a Loeb or a Leopold. The creative Imagination works outwards, steadily increasing the gap between the visioned and the actual, till this becomes the great gulf fixed between art and nature. Few writers of crime-stories become murderers--if any do, it is not the result of identifying themselves with their murderous heroes.

That you cannot have Christian principles without Christ is becoming increasingly clear, because their validity as principles depends on Christ's authority.

The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns.