Could you not give me some sign, or tell me something about you that never changes, or some other way to know you, or thing to know you by?" — "No, Curdie: that would be to keep you from knowing me. You must know me in quite another way from that. It would not be the least use to you or me either if I were to make you know me in that way. It would be but to know the sign of me — not to know me myself.

The birds, the poets of the animal creation - what though they never get beyond the lyrical! - awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children.

But I begin to think the chief difficulty in writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.

A man's real belief is that which he lives by. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks.

It is not the high summer alone that is God's. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man's winters are His - the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness - even 'the winter of our discontent.

Each is but a means to an end; in the perfected end we find the intent, and there God — not in the laws themselves, except as his means of revealing himself. For that same reason, human science cannot discover God. For human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God's science, it works with its back to him, and is always leaving him — his intent.

The ideal is the only absolute real; and it must become the real in the individual life as well, however impossible they may count it who never tried it.