When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.

Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.

Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.

Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.