Robert Hugh Benson

There is no obstinacy like religious obstinacy; for the spiritual man encourages himself in his wrong course, by a conviction that he is following Divine guidance.

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 …

Real love...is a continual emptying and slaying of self, a continual immolation of self on the altar of the beloved. ... It is exactly this that distinguishes it from its caricature—its antichrist—from lust or liking. Lust and liking …

Real love seeks not to possess, but to be possessed; not, so to speak, to devour the beloved, to satisfy self with the beloved, but the exact contrary—to be devoured and to satisfy.

Man’s highest life does not consist in self-expression, but in self-sacrifice.

We all win from God exactly what we deserve. We all get from God exactly what we really want of Him.

Religion...must at least touch the will; for however small our will may be, it is always large enough to be united to the Will of God.

The man who says, 'Unless I feel, I will not believe,' is as narrow and foolish as the man who says, 'Unless I understand, I will not believe.'

If God be Truth, and God be Love, is it not absolutely inevitable that the Love of God should bring the Truth of God down to the level of the very simplest?

The Cross is the symbol of absolutely endless expansion; it is never content; it points for ever and ever to four indefinitely receding points.

Remorse is easy enough, but repentance means love; and a soul that has lost her Lover has lost her own power of loving.

If a soul lives long enough on the plane of sensuality or of ambition, she finds that Christ is worth less than nothing there.

To each soul Christ comes, all trusting as a friend, and in each soul He is betrayed over and over again.

Each soul is as great as the world, and in each soul there is room for all the tragedies of the world to be re-enacted, as every puddle is great enough to hold the sun.

Divine Truth always must be extreme—it must, so to speak, always overlap at both ends, just because it is Divine, and therefore much too big for this world.

The moment a soul recognises that there may be a Joy in Pain which is absent from Pleasure, she has taken the first step towards the practical solution of the Problem of Pain.

The whole of Nature exists on the principle of vicarious suffering; and to reject Christianity because of the doctrine of the Atonement is to reject Nature itself on the same account.

To-day as in Bethlehem, the bourgeois sits at home and discusses the Census, while Shepherds and Kings adore in the Stable.

Complacency is the one obstacle to progress, in finance, in art, in intellect, and in the things of the spirit.

Just as in social things the essential bourgeois is one who, being tolerably well off, is completely complacent with his position—unlike the lowest class which has no position to be complacent about, and the highest class which does not …

It is a good deal more fashionable, and considered a great deal more 'spiritual,' to stand outside creeds and churches than within them.

Man must have liberty — he was made for it; but what liberty would that be which he has not learned to use?

A great deal depends on the temper of the court. Facts depend for their interpretation upon the point of view.

Democracy doesn't give the Average Man any real power at all. It swamps him among, under his friends — that is to say, it kills his individuality; and his individuality is the one thing he has which is worth anything.