"The Holy Spirit of God dwelling in us, knowing our wants better than we, Himself pleads in our prayers, raising us to higher and holier desires than we can express in words, which can only find utterance in sighings and aspirations."

"A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."

"Sir Max Beerbohm and Mgr Ronald Knox; each stands at the summit of his own art. They differ in scope. Where they attempt the same tasks, in parody, they are equal and supreme over all competitors. Sir Max has confined himself to the arts; Mgr Knox goes higher, to the loftiest regions of the human spirit. His Enthusiasm should be recognized as the greatest work of literary art of the century."

"He who travels in the Barque of Peter had better not look too closely into the engine room."

"All these riches, then, of her theology the Church has acquired, one might almost say, like the British Empire, in a fit of absence of mind. She was so busy scrapping with the heretics that she wasn't conscious of saying anything she hadn't always said; and yet, when she had time to sit down and look about her, she found it took ten minutes to sing the Credo instead of three."

"If you have a sloppy religion you get a sloppy atheism."

"I suppose there has been no subtler attack upon the Christian faith devised by its enemies in these last hundred years than the attack made in the name of "comparative religion". If you pick up a book on "Atonement", and plough your way through ideas of atonement among primitive tribes, pagan ideas of atonement, Jewish ideas of atonement, Christian ideas of atonement, you will find by the end of it that atonement, for the author's mind, has ceased to have any meaning. And he has been successful, in so far as he has managed to infect your mind with the wooliness which is the leading characteristic of his own. Comparative religion is an admirable recipe for making people comparatively religious."

"It doesn't do to say that heresy produces the development of doctrine, because that annoys the theologians. But it is true to say that as a matter of history the development of doctrine has been largely a reaction on the Church's part to the attacks of heresy."

"Only those of us, I think, who were born under Queen Victoria know what it feels like to assume, without questioning, that England is permanently top nation, that foreigners do not matter, and that if the worst comes to the worst, Lord Salisbury will send a gunboat."

"Words are living things, full of shades of meaning, full of associations; and, what is more, they are apt to change their significance from one generation to the next. The translator who understands his job feels, constantly, like Alice in Wonderland trying to play croquet with flamingoes for mallets and hedgehogs for balls; words are for ever eluding his grasp."

"Only man has dignity; only man, therefore, can be funny."

"There once was a man who said: "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad.""

"It is so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil, when he is the only explanation of it."

"The prevailing attitude of the speakers was one of heavy disagreement with a number of things which the reader had not said."

"When suave politeness, temp'ring bigot zeal Corrected I believe to One does feel."

"An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the Rudiments of Paradise."

"Anger [is], according to some, a transient hatred, or at least very like it."

"Innocence is like polished armour; it adorns, and it defends."

"He who has no mind to trade with the devil, should be so wise as to keep away from his shop."

"A man's life is an appendix to his heart."

"Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, by degrees gnawing and creeping into it, as that does; till at length it has eat out the very heart and substance of the metal."

"[M]ost of the appearing mirth in the world is not mirth, but art. The wounded spirit is not seen, but walks under a disguise."

"Action is the highest perfection and drawing forth the utmost power, vigor, and activity of man's nature."

"[T]hough reason is not to be relied upon, as a guide universally sufficient to direct us what to do; yet it is generally to be relied upon and obeyed, where it tells us what we are not to do."

"[I]f there be any truer measure of a man, than by what he does, it must be, by what he gives."

"Passion is the drunkenness of the mind."

"The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them by a single sentence, consisting of two or three words."

"The covetous person lives as if the world were made altogether for him, and not he for the world."

"[N]o man's religion ever survives his morals."

"It is idleness that creates impossibilities; and where men care not to do a thing, they shelter themselves under a persuasion that it cannot be done."

"[T]here never was any heart truly great and generous' that was not also tender and compassionate."

"[H]e that despairs limits an infinite power to a finite apprehension, and measures Providence by his own little contracted model."

"Truth itself shall lose its credit, if delivered by a person that has none."

"[S]ociety is built upon trust, and trust upon the confidence that men have of one another's integrity."

"For he that is a good man, is three quarters of his way towards the being a good Christian, wheresoever he lives, or whatsoever he is called."

"[W]onder is from surprise; and surprise ceases upon experience."

"[A]s for covetousness, we may truly say of it, that it makes both the alpha and omega in the devil's alphabet, and that it is the first vice in corrupt nature which moves, and the last which dies."

"There is poetry and there is beauty in real sympathy; but there is more—there is action. […] The noblest and most powerful form of sympathy is not merely the responsive tear, the echoed sigh, the answering look—it is the embodiment of the sentiment in actual help."

"The everlasting covenant which God has made with Jesus, and through Jesus with all His beloved people, individually, is a strong ground of consolation amidst the tremblings of human hope, the fluctuations of creature things, and the instability of all that earth calls good."

"Fifty years ago, few would have believed that Dutch, and Russian, and Icelandic, and Greek, and Latin, and Persian, and Mahratti, and French, and English, were all indubitable developments from one and the same original tongue, and that the common ancestors of the nations who speak them were – in times that may almost be called historical – in times, at any rate, the reality of which can be rigidly tested by the microscope and the spectrum analysis of Philology – were living together as an undivided family in the same pastoral tents. In the present day, no one doubts the fact, except a few intrepid theologians."

"When we look at the table which is before us [showing the branches of the Indo- European language family], [ . . . ] it is but a concise statement of the astonishing truth, that we Europeans, together with the Persians and Hindoos, however wide may be the apparent and superficial differences between us, are, nevertheless, members of a close and common brotherhood in the great families of nations. First westward and northward, afterwards eastward and southward, the Aryans extended; they forgot the rock from whence they were hewn, and the hole of the pit whence they were digged: they became wholly ignorant of their mutual relationship; and when, in their various emigrations, they met each other – like the lion-whelps of a common lair – they met each other no longer as brothers but as foes: yet brothers they were; and now, at least, the science of language has restored to them the knowledge of this unsuspected truth."

"No true work since the world began was ever wasted; no true life since the world began has ever failed. Oh, understand those two perverted words "failure" and "success." and measure them by the eternal, not by the earthly standard. When after thirty obscure, toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village carpenter, one came forth to be preeminently the man of sorrows, to wander from city to city in homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon the shameful cross — was that a failure? Nay, my brethren.it was the death of Him who lived that we might follow His footsteps, it was the life, it was the death of the Son of God."

"then, indeed, the Hindoos no less than ourselves would have recognized the bond of unity between us because of the common ancestors from whose loins we both alike are sprung, and we no less than they should have seen that in coming to Hindostan with our advanced civilization, we were returning home with splendid gifts to visit a member of one common family, and that the meeting between us was but the meeting of Esau and Jacob after long years of separation, – who met each other with mutual affection and the kiss of peace, although from the womb it had been prophesied respecting them that ‘the elder should serve the younger.’"

"Prayer is the pulse of the renewed soul; and the constancy of its beat is the test and measure of the spiritual life."

"I have just put my soul as a blank into the hand of Jesus, my Redeemer, and desired Him to write on it what He pleases; I know it will be His image."

"Lord Jesus, I am weary in Thy work, but not of it. If I have not yet finished my course, let me go and speak for Thee once more in the field, seal Thy truth, and come home to die."

"Why should the Devil have all the best tunes?"

"Come poor, lost, undone sinner, come just as you are to Christ."

"Faith is the vital artery of the soul. When we begin to believe, we begin to love. Faith grafts the soul into Christ, as the scion into the stock, and fetches all its nutriment from the blessed Vine."

"The Scripture is to be its own interpreter, or rather the Spirit speaking in it; nothing can cut the diamond but the diamond; nothing can interpret Scripture but Scripture."