The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think.

The danger of loss of faith in God is not that one will believe in nothing, but rather that one will believe in anything.

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth

Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.

Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.