I do honour the very flea of his dog.

Those glories come too late That on our ashes wait.

To have entities in an aura is akin to being a landlord in a house with locked rooms to which there is no access.

Forgiveness is a game only saints play Kabir.

In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half hung.

Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.

Western European civilization has witnessed a sort of atomizing process, in which the individual is more and more set free from his natural setting in family and neighborhood, and becomes a sort of replaceable unit in the social machine, His nearest neighbors may not even know his name. He is free to move from place to place, from job to job, from acquaintance to acquaintance, and -- if he has attained a high degree of emancipation -- from wife to wife. He is in every context a more and more anonymous and replaceable part, the perfect incarnation of the rationalist conception of man. Wherever western civilization has spread in the past one hundred years, it has carried this atomizing process with it. Its characteristic product in Calcutta, Shanghai, or Johannesburg, is the modern city into which myriads of human beings, loosened from their old ties in village or tribe or caste, like grains of sand fretted by water from an ancient block of sandstone, are ceaselessly churned around in the whirlpool of the city -- anonymous, identical, replaceable units. In such a situation, it is natural that men should long for some sort of real community, for men cannot be human without it. It is especially natural that Christians should reach out after that part of Christian doctrine which speaks of the true, God-given community, the Church of Jesus Christ. We have witnessed the appalling results of trying to go back to some sort of primitive collectivity based on the total control of the individual, down to the depths of his spirit, by an all-powerful group. Yet we know that we cannot condemn this solution to the problem of man's loneliness if we have no other to offer. It is natural that men should ask with a greater eagerness than ever before, such questions as these: "Is there in truth a family of God on earth to which I can belong, a place where all men can be truly at home? If so, where is it to be found, what are its marks, and how is it related to, and dis tinguished from, the known communities of family, nation, and culture? What are its boundaries, its structure, its terms of membership? And how comes it that those who claim to be the spokesmen of that one holy fellowship are themselves at war with one another as to the fundamentals of its nature, and unable to agree to live together in unity and concord?" The breakdown of Christendom has forced such questions as these to the front. I think that there is no more urgent theological task than to try to give them plain and credible answers.

Come, sing now, sing; for I know you sing well; I see you have a singing face.

Every silver lining has a cloud.

Show me a guy who is afraid to look bad, and I'll show you a guy you can beat every time.

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play on the dead.

A man is very apt to complain of the ingratitude of those who have risen far above him.

The old mayor climbed the belfry tower, The ringers ran by two, by three; "Pull, if ye never pulled before; Good ringers, pull your best," quoth he. "Play uppe, play uppe, O Boston bells! Ply all your changes, all your swells, Play uppe The Brides of Enderby."

As high as Heaven, as deep as Hell.

So far had the pen, under the king, the superiority over the sword.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly. -Lauren Bacall.

Ay me! what perils do environ The man that meddles with cold iron!

I ask not a life for the dear ones, All radiant, as others have done, But that life may have just enough shadow To temper the glare of the sun; I would pray God to guard them from evil, But my prayer would bound back to myself: Ah! a seraph may pray for a sinner, But a sinner must pray for himself.