I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.

But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.

Evil is a necessary part of the order of the universe.

When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.

It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.