“Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.”

And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.

Life is too short to read a bad book.

Children must be educated by love, not punishment.

Masturbation! The amazing availability of it!

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

The light music of whiskey falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.

In the particular is contained the universal.

We are bound together by the sympathy of our antipathies.

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

It’s difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.

To step into acting was not that difficult a transition to make. What was difficult was the work and the practice that went into becoming good at it, because I hadn’t had any training.

Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Faith enables many of us to endure life’s difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.

The older we become, the more difficult it is to fill our hearts with wonder. Only God is big enough to keep filling us with wonder.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

The thing is, I live a very public life, and I have to keep things personal, or else I have no personal life. It’s very difficult.

Happy moments, PRAISE GOD Difficult moments, SEEK GOD Quiet moments, WORSHIP GOD Painful moments, TRUST GOD Every moment, THANK GOD