“Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.”

“I have said that she had no face; but that meant she had a thousand faces”

“The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next.”

“Forgiveness is one of the most beautiful words in the human vocabulary. How much pain and unhappy consequences could be avoided if we all learned the meaning of this word!”

“Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.

“That which never was, cannot exist, and that which exists, cannot cease to exist. Even the Sun is transient, coming into existence and vanishing. The candle both exists and does not exist, for, when it is burnt, its substance dissolves back into the five elements. Everything which has a name and a form ceases one day to exist in that particular mode, though it does not cease to be a creation of God.”

“The following morning, when I met for breakfast with the staff, we kept noisy music playing loudly on a tape recorder as a precaution against hidden microphones. It was a good thing we did: Later, we found five listening devices hidden in our rooms in the guesthouse. One staffer unscrewed a plate over the light switch in his room, discovered a bug, removed it, and took it home as a souvenir.”

“The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a simple datum of experience.”

“The church is blending into the community by embracing what the world enjoys and, in turn, bringing inside the church the world’s ideas and interests.”

“The greater the impact you want to make, the greater your influence needs to be. Whatever you will accomplish is restricted by your ability to lead others.”

“Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

“Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom, Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

“You can have everything you want in life if you just help enough people get what they want in life.” 

“I have no recollection of that ever happening.”

“Leave no "full stop" in between the sentences that make up your life story. If anything, let "commas" show that when you were brought down by challenges, you rose up with passion and moved on again!”