Hard features every bungler can command: To draw true beauty shows a master's hand.

Old Grimes is dead, that good old man, We ne'er shall see him more; He used to wear a long black coat All button'd down before.

An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?

It is the worst of all superstitions to assume that the epistemological characteristics of one branch of knowledge must necessarily be applicable to any other branch.

Assume a virtue if you have it not.

Anyone can believe that Jesus was a god: what is so hard to credit is that He who hung upon the cross was the God. That is what you are asked as Christians to believe. And it is the sword, glittering but fearful. It must cut your life away from the standards of this world, away from its thought and its measures, no less than its aims and hopes. Hard and bitter is the separation, and you will be parted from many great and noble men, some perhaps your own teachers, who can accept about Jesus everything but the one thing needful. The Christian faith, if accepted, drives a wedge between its own adherents and the disciples of every other philosophy or religion, however lofty or soaring. And they will not see this; they will tell you that really your views and theirs are the same thing, and only differ in words, which, if only you were a little more highly trained, you would understand. Even among Christ's nominal servants there are many who think a little good-will is all that is needed to bridge the gulf -- a little amiability and mutual explanation, a more careful use of phrases, would soon accommodate Christianity to fashionable modes of speaking and thinking, and destroy all causes of provocation. So they would. But they would destroy also its one inalienable attraction: that of being... a wonder, and a beauty, and a terror -- no dull and drab system of thought, no mere symbolic idealism.

Politics, n: Poly "many" + tics "blood-sucking parasites".

We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees.

I believe they talked of me, for they laughed consumedly.

Debate is the death of conversation.

You can't get to the top by sitting on your bottom.

Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort As if he mocked himself and scorned his spirit That could be moved to smile at anything.

It is a sign of a dull nature to occupy oneself deeply in matters that concern the body; for instance, to be over much occupied about exercise, about eating and drinking, about easing oneself, about sexual intercourse.

There are, to whom my satire seems too bold; Scarce to wise Peter complaisant enough, And something said of Chartres much too rough.

Trouble is a part of your life, and if you don't share it, you don't give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough.

To a crazy ship all winds are contrary.

Prince, give praise to our French ladies For the sweet sound their speaking carries; 'Twixt Rome and Cadiz many a maid is, But no good girl's lip out of Paris. - Algernon Charles Swinburne,

It was a real body; there can be no doubt about that. Hundreds of people could not have been so mistaken, especially when Jesus offered clear evidence of it. But it was not an earthbound body. It was something that bore a developmental relationship to an earthly human body, but it was not identical with it. There was clearly a continuity of life between the body of Jesus and the body of the resurrected Jesus, but in the process of resurrection it had undergone a very fundamental change. That, at least, seems obvious. So much for the list of dissimilarities; the body of Jesus after the resurrection had a different appearance and also a different "form". It was "like" the previous body, it had some sort of developmental relationship to it, but it was obviously not "identical" with it. Now we must consider the similarities. Strangely, they all came down to one factor, but that factor is so important that it outweighs all the dissimilarities. It is simply this: Jesus before and after the resurrection was undeniably the same person. No matter what extraordinary changes had taken place in his bodily form, all who knew him well had no doubt at all who he was. They "knew" it was the Lord.

The actor who slapped you on the stage waits behind the curtain to congratulate you on your performance

Pentecost The Spirit is Love expressed towards man as redeeming love, and the Spirit is truth, and the Spirit is the Holy Spirit. Redemption is inconceivable without truth and holiness. But the mere fact that the Holy Spirit's first recorded action in the gospels is an expression of redeeming love should cause us to suspect a teaching which represents His work as primarily, if not solely, the sanctification of our own souls to the practical exclusion of His activity in us towards others. It is important to teach of Him as the Spirit of holiness; it is also important to teach of Him as the Spirit which in us labours for the salvation of men everywhere.