Quotes from ROBERT HUGH BENSON

While friendship itself has an air of eternity about it, seeming to transcend all natural limits, there is hardly any emotion so utterly at the mercy of time. We form friendships, and grow out of them. It might almost be said that we cannot retain the faculty of friendship unless we are continually making new friends.

The Church must be intelligible to the simple as well as to the shrewd.

A lion is at liberty who can follow the laws of his own nature, who can eat when his stomach tells him, who can sleep when his fierce eyes grow weary, who can scratch long furrows in a forest tree when his claws feel so disposed. He is not at liberty when he lives in a cage, is fed on horseflesh at 4 p.m., and is compelled at the point of a red-hot poker to spell P-I-G – PIG, in the presence of a diverted crowd.

Once, in the early ages, Satan's attack had been made on the bodily side, with whips and fire and beasts; in the sixteenth century it had been on the intellectual side; in the twentieth century on the springs of moral and spiritual life. Now it seemed as if the assault was on all three planes at once.

When a man falls in love suddenly his whole centre changes. Up to that point he has probably referred everything to himself--considered things from his own point. When he falls in love the whole thing is shifted; he becomes a part of the circumference--perhaps even the whole circumference; someone else becomes the centre.

You can love a person deeply and sincerely whom you do not like. You can like a person passionately whom you do not love.

Youth is a disease that must be borne with patiently! Time, indeed, will cure it.

There is all the difference in the world between knowing that a catastrophe is going to happen, and knowing that it has happened.

Society is not merely a select body of spiritual or intellectual persons, but a great organism composed of all kinds of members, a net containing bad and good.

No man can be a friend of Jesus Christ who is not a friend of his neighbor.

How difficult it was to hold the eyes focused on that far horizon when this world lay in the foreground so compelling in its splendour and its strength!

Please do not think for a second, as some people do, that Love is primarily an affair of the emotions. It is not: it never ought to be. It is an affair of the will: it is an act of choice.

Competition, founded upon the conflicting interests of individuals, is in reality far less productive of wealth and enterprise than co-operation, involving though it does the constant apparent sacrifice of the individual to the common interests.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly is not freedom, except in the minds of those who prefer darkness to light and chains to liberty. The more true information we can acquire, the better for our enfranchisement.

Be simple and quiet. Whenever your soul begins to be disturbed and anxious, put yourself in His Hands, and refuse to decide for yourself. It is easy, so easy.

As for the gates of hell, is there any other institution in Christendom which compares with this for immovability, authority and impressiveness?

I think that the insane desire one has sometimes to bang and kick grumblers and peevish persons is a Divine instinct.

Friendliness took the place of charity, contentment the place of hope, and knowledge the place of faith.

For where men have made the earth that is trodden underfoot, and have largely veiled the heavens themselves, it is but natural that they should think that they have made everything, and that it is they who rule it.

A broken heart and God's will done would be better than that God's will should be avoided and her own satisfied.

To say 'Hail Mary, Hail Mary,' is the best way of telling her how much we love her. And then this string of beads is like Our Lady's girdle, and her children love to finger it, and whisper to her. And then we say our paternosters, too; and all the while we are talking she is shewing us pictures of her dear Child, and we look at all the great things He did for us, one by one; and then we turn the page and begin again.

Christianity is absurd and impossible. Now, you know, it cannot be that! It may be untrue--I am not speaking of that now, even though I am perfectly certain that it is absolutely true--but it cannot be absurd so long as educated and virtuous people continue to hold it. To say that it is absurd is simple pride; it is to dismiss all who believe in it as not merely mistaken, but unintelligent as well---

In the ages of faith a very inadequate grasp of religion would pass muster; in these searching days none but the humble and the pure could stand the test for long, unless indeed they were protected by a miracle of ignorance. The alliance of Psychology and Materialism did indeed seem, looked at from one angle, to account for everything; it needed a robust supernatural perception to understand their practical inadequacy.

Men do recognise at last that a supernatural Religion involves an absolute authority, and that Private Judgment in matters of faith is nothing else than the beginning of disintegration.