“You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.”

“The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.”

“It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.”

“For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”

“Suspicion often creates what it suspects.”

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

“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.”

“An 'impersonal God'-well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads-better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap-best of all. But God himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, King, husband-that is quite another matter.”

“What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.”

“They have pulled down deep heaven on their heads.”

“Readers are advised to remember the devil is a liar.”

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

“Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out...”

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

“I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.”