"Thus we return again to Dostoyevsky’s terrifying little truism: If there is no God, everything is permissible.... The atheist argues: 'If there were a God, how could there be injustice?' To which Pascal replies: 'If there is injustice, there must be true justice for it to be relative to and a defect of; and this true justice is not found on Earth or in man, therefore it must exist in Heaven and God.' Either there or nowhere; and if nowhere, then 'everything is permissible.' But not everything is permissible. Therefore there must be a God." Peter Kreeft Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained
"Thank heaven, I am bringing to at least one human being the news that is at bottom the only good news to any son of Adam. Your life has not been useless." Adam Wayne to Turnbull, the toy-shop keeper, in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
"Begin by looking at everything from the moral point of view, and you will end by believing in God." Thomas Arnold, famous headmaster of Rugby school and father of Matthew Arnold, quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society
"If [his recently deceased wife Joy] 'is not,' then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared. But this must be nonsense; vacuity revealed to whom? Bankruptcy declared to whom? To other boxes of fireworks or clouds of atoms. I will never believe – more strictly, I can’t believe – that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets. No, my real fear is not of materialism. If it were true, we – or what we mistake for 'we' – could get out, get from under the harrow. An overdose of sleeping pills would do it. I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap. Or, worse still, rats in a laboratory. Someone said, I believe, 'God always geometrizes.' Supposing the truth were 'God always vivisects'?" C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed
"As knowledge increases, wonder deepens." Charles Morgan, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail April 24, 2013
"Was Kierkegaard right when he said that all despair about earthly things is actually – and without us necessarily being aware of this – despair about the Eternal?" Leszek Kolakowski in First Things June-July 2003
"If you cannot mould yourself as you would wish, how can you expect other people to be entirely to your liking?" Thomas à Kempis, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe and Mail October 21, 2002