According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

Time and again, the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. But each time, it was the dog that died.