A moderately bad man knows he is not very good; a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right.
Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.
But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.
Hardly any amount of oppression from above takes the heart out of a boy like oppression from his fellows.
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not.... We are dealing with fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality.
If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons' schools, the history of education would be very different.
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. Just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.
If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.
Nearly all that a boy reads [in the papers] in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance.
Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.
None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics.... A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.
Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humor.... This association is a lie.
Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.
The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.
The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.
There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.
There is nothing progressive about being pig headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake.
They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess.
When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.
You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong--only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him.
You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible.
[Human beings] know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.