He (God) can be revealed only to the child; perfectly, to the pure child only. All the discipline of the world is to make men children, that God may be revealed to them.

What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question - How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? Even with her altered complexion and face of dislike; disenchanted of the belief that clung around her; known for a living, walking sepulcher, faithless, deluding, traitorous; I felt, notwithstanding all this, that she was beautiful. Upon this I pondered with undiminished perplexity.

Never tell a child 'you have a soul.' Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.

Every soul has a landscape that changes with the wind that sweeps the sky, with the clouds that return after its rain.

No; but you came, and found the riddles waiting for you! Indeed you are yourself the only riddle. What you call riddles are truths, and seem riddles because you are not true.

For when is the child the ideal child in our eyes and to our hearts? Is it not when with gentle hand he takes his father by the beard, and turns that father's face up to his brothers and sisters to kiss? when even the lovely selfishness of love-seeking has vanished, and the heart is absorbed in loving?

The whole history of the Christian life is a series of resurrections. . . . Every time we find our hearts are troubled, that we are not rejoicing in God, a resurrection must follow; a resurrection out of the night of troubled thought into the gladness of the truth.