“The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.”

“If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.”

“Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, "I am what I do.”

“You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.”

“To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.”

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they've got to be free. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. (...) If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.”

“Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.”

“Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.”

“Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!”

“If things are real, they're there all the time.”

“Am I lost or just less found?”

“The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)...”

“One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.”

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

“Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad.”