“The gayety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no more than we need; there is barely enough to go round.”

A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.

To have given pleasure to one human being is a recollection that sweetens life.

Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.

It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.

A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.

Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.

Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?

This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.

Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.

The man who never tells an unpalatable truth ‘at the wrong time’ (the right time has yet to be discovered) is the man whose success in life is fairly well assured.

Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.

Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.

An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice.

It is impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.

English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.

When we really start to take a look at who we think we are, we become very grace prone.

The door to God is the insecurity of not knowing anything. Bear the grace of that uncertainty and all wisdom will be yours.

Christ has made my soul beautiful with the jewels of grace and virtue.

Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.

And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.

At a time when all too many of our leading thinkers are mired in the weeds of provincialism and narrow ideological wars, Postel has written a work of grace, intelligence, and towering integrity.

Grace is God’s acceptance of us. Faith is our acceptance of God accepting us.

It is the skeleton of truth, to be clothed and rounded out by the living graces of a holy life.