
Letter to F. W. Hirst on being unable to write a preface to Essays in Liberalism by "Six Oxford Men" (2 January 1897), as quoted In the Golden Days (1947) by F. W. Hirst, p. 158
1890s
Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. IX : A Snake in the Grass; Eliza to Gilbert
Letter to F. W. Hirst on being unable to write a preface to Essays in Liberalism by "Six Oxford Men" (2 January 1897), as quoted In the Golden Days (1947) by F. W. Hirst, p. 158
1890s
“Those who turn to God for comfort may find comfort but I do not think they will find God.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
“Remember that yours is not the only heart that may be wishing for love.”
Source: Before Midnight: A Retelling of Cinderella
Source: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XV : The Need of a God, p. 218.
Context: If I can reconcile myself to the certainty of death only by forgetting it, I am not happy. And if I can dispose of the fact of human misery about me only by shutting my thoughts as well as myself within my comfortable garden, I may assure myself that I am happy, but I am not. There is a skeleton in the closet of the universe, and I may at any moment be in the face of it. Happiness is inseparable from confidence in action; and confidence of action is inseparable from what the schoolmen called peace -- that is, poise of mind with reference to everything I may possibly encounter in the chances of fortune.
Now this perfect openness to experience is not possible if pain is the last word of pain. Unless there is something behind the fact of pain, some kind of mystery or problem in it whose solution shows the pain to be other than what it pretends, there is no happiness for man in this world or the next; for no matter how fair the world might in time become, the fact that it had been as bad as it is would remain an unbanishable misery, unbanishable by God or any other power.
2010s, 2015, Remarks at the SMU 100th Spring Commencement (May 2015)
Speech to the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations in St. James's Hall, London (15 May 1886), quoted in The Times (17 May 1886), p. 6
1880s
Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Mister Monday (2003), p. 247.
“Love God and find him within - the only treasure worth finding.”