The past is not what it was.

The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.

Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being.