15 quotes
Comparative religion is an admirable recipe for making people comparatively religious.
The Hidden Stream (1952)
Only man has dignity; only man, therefore, can be funny.
If you have a sloppy religion you get a sloppy atheism.
There once was a man who said: "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
When suave politeness, temp'ring bigot zeal
Corrected I believe to One does feel.
He who travels in the Barque of Peter had better not look too closely into the engine room.
Marriage does not withdraw us from the life we knew; it means that we wade deeper in the stream of it, take the strain of it more boldly than before.
The prevailing attitude of the speakers was one of heavy disagreement with a number of things which the reader had not said.
It is so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil, when he is the only explanation of it.
It doesn't do to say that heresy produces the development of doctrine, because that annoys the theologians. But it is true to say that as a matter of history the development of doctrine has been largely a reaction on the Church's part to the attacks of heresy.
The Hidden Stream (1952)
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.
God and the Atom (1945)
Words are living things, full of shades of meaning, full of associations; and, what is more, they are apt to change their significance from one generation to the next. The translator who understands his job feels, constantly, like Alice in Wonderland trying to play croquet with flamingoes for mallets and hedgehogs for balls; words are for ever eluding his grasp.
On Englishing the Bible (1949)
All these riches, then, of her theology the Church has acquired, one might almost say, like the British Empire, in a fit of absence of mind. She was so busy scrapping with the heretics that she wasn't conscious of saying anything she hadn't always said; and yet, when she had time to sit down and look about her, she found it took ten minutes to sing the Credo instead of three.
The Hidden Stream (1952)
It is natural for man or woman to look out on a world-picture framed in a human companionship; we see better, don't we, with two eyes than with one? And man and woman happily wedded can attain, between them, a clearness of view, a sureness of touch, that would not have come to either of them if they had travelled alone.
A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Disputed