The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.

Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.

Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason.

The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.

And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.

We are like the penny, because we have the image of the king stamped on us, the divine king.

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.