Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.