On Heaven and Hell:

Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth, and you will get neither.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a ‘‘wandering to find home,’’ why should we not look forward to the arrival?

It is hard to have patience with people who say ‘‘There is no death’’ or ‘‘Death doesn’t matter.’’ There is death. And whatever is, matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

On our life here on Earth:

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, "Blessed are they that mourn."

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘‘own’’ their bodies—those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.