Great Throughts Treasury

"The real tragedy of our prayers is not that God so often refuses to grant them. The tragedy is we so often ask for the wrong thing."

"Worldliness is not, in the last analysis, love of possessions, or the habit of courting great personages. It is simply the weakness of fibre which makes us take our standards from the society round us."

"Whatever else it is - let us be clear about that from the outset - religion is something we belong to, not something which belongs to us; something that has got hold of us, not something we have got hold of."

"Hope is something that is demanded of us; it is not, then, a mere reasoned calculation of our chances. Nor is it merely the bubbling up of a sanguine temperament; if it is demanded of us, it lies not in the temperament but in the will... Hoping for what? For delivereance from persecution, for immunity from plague, pestilence, and famine...? No, for the grace of persevering in his Christian profession, and for the consequent achievement of a happy immortality. Strictly speaking, then, the highest exercise of hope, supernaturally speaking, is to hope for perseverance and for Heaven when it looks, when it feels, as if you were going to lose both one and the other."

"When suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal, corrected 'I believe' to 'one does feel'. "

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

"There was a young man who said "God Must find it exceedingly odd To think that the tree Should continue to be When there's no one about in the quad." Reply: "Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd; I am always about in the quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.” "

"1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know. 2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course. 3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable. 4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end. 5. No Chinaman must figure in the story. 6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right. 7. The detective himself must not commit the crime. 8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover. 9. The sidekick of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader. 10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them."

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

"A good sermon should be like a woman's skirt: short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials."

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

"Can anything matter, unless there is Somebody who minds?"

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

"All men who have ideals . . . live by some kind of faith, by committing themselves to some kind of loyalty which is not universally recognized as the common property of all thinking men. They must have something-something outside themselves, to make them feel life is worth living, that good rather than evil is the explanation of the world."

"If a man tells you that he is fond of the Imitation, view him with sudden suspicion; he is either a dabbler or a Saint."

"I can?t see why Almighty God shouldn?t indulgence all sorts of pious practices which aren?t indulgenced by the Church; shouldn?t give you or me the equivalent of a seven years? indulgence when we get up to make room for an old lady in a bus."

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

"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."

"It is possible to argue that the true business of faith is not to produce emotional conviction in us, but to teach us to do without it."

"O God, for as much as without Thee We are not enabled to doubt Thee, Help us all by Thy grace To convince the whole race It knows nothing whatever about Thee."

"Order is the cipher by which Mind speaks to mind in the midst of chaos."

"The hall-mark of American humor is its pose of illiteracy."

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

"There was once a young man of Devizes, Whose ears were of different sizes; The one that was small Was no use at all, But the other won several prizes."

"We Catholics have not only to do our best to keep down our own warring passions and live decent lives, which will often be hard enough in this odd world we have been born into. We have to bear witness to moral principles which the world owned yesterday and has begun to turn its back on today. We have to disapprove of some of the things our neighbors do, without being stuffy about it; we have to be charitable towards our neighbors and make great allowances for them, without falling into the mistake of condoning their low standards and so encouraging them to sin. Two of the most difficult and delicate tasks a man can undertake; and it happens, nowadays, not only to priests, to whom it comes as part of their professional duty, but to ordinary lay people... So we must know what are the unalterable principles we hold, and why we hold them; we must see straight in a world that is full of moral fog."

"When the dogma of the Assumption was defined a friend of mine, a very intelligent Mohammedan, congratulated me on the gesture which the Holy Father had made; a gesture (said he) against materialism. And I think he was right. When our Lord took his blessed Mother, soul and body, into heaven, he did honor to the poor clay of which our human bodies are fashioned. It was the first step towards reconciling all things in heaven and earth to his eternal Father, towards making all things new. The whole of nature, St Paul tells us, groans in a common travail all the while. And not only do we see that, but we ourselves do the same; we ourselves although we have already begun to reap our spiritual harvest, groan in our hearts, waiting for that adoption which is the ransoming of our bodies from their slavery. That transformation of our material bodies to which we look forward one day has been accomplished?we know it now for certain-in her. When the Son of God came to earth, he came to turn our hearts away from earth, Godwards. And as the traveler, shading his eyes while he contemplates some long vista of scenery, searches about for a human figure that will give him the scale of those distant surroundings, so we, with dazzled eyes looking Godwards, identify and welcome one purely human figure close to his throne. One ship has rounded the headland, one destiny is achieved, one human perfection exists. And as we watch it, we see God clearer, see God greater, through this masterpiece of his dealings with mankind."

"You must believe, sooner or later, in a Mind which brought mind into existence out of matter, unless you are going to sit down before the hopeless metaphysical contradiction of saying that matter somehow managed to develop itself into mind."