A. N. Wilson Quotes

Millions of Christians can and do go through life attending church, listening to sermons, reciting the creeds and never confront the seeming contradictions, redaction and myths passed off as verifiable history.

Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.

It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue - but I would argue it nevertheless - that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music - both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing - is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.

Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.

I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.

The Royal Family are not like you and me. They live in houses so big that you can walk round all day and never need to meet your spouse. The Queen and Prince Philip have never shared a bedroom in their lives. They don't even have breakfast together.

[..] when a friendship has become a matter of arranging to meet, dates in diaries, agreement that next week or the next are 'no good', then it has been silently acknowledged that the old intimacy has gone.

In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity
or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity
by being opinionated rather than by being learned.

As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed, what matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.

It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.

The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.

I don't write books inadvertently.

I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off 'Thought for the Day' when it comes on the radio.

I think that if you can't be loyal to the Church, it's best to get out.

I very much dislike the intolerance and moralism of many Christians, and feel more sympathy with Honest Doubters than with them.

We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is that God is Dad, and we wish him dead.

We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.

It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective.

In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper.

The latest research has revealed that women have a higher IQ than men.

In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

When Christians start thinking about Jesus, things start breaking down, they lose their faith. It's perfectly possible to go to church every Sunday and not ask any questions, just because you like it as a way of life. They fear that if they ask questions they'll lose their Christ, the very linchpin of their religion.

'In Memoriam' has been my companion for all my grownup life.

I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief 'don't matter,' that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.

..for a man ( Roger Scruton ) whose calling and raison d'etre is that difficult business - not just telling the truth but finding out what the truth would be like if we told it - it was a huge blow to be exposed as a lickspittle of tobacco giants. If your job is enquiry, you cannot accept money for providing the answers before the question has been examined.

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.

One symptom of his (Hitler) being strangely at variance with reality, or the nature of things,was his gift for wearing inappropriate of ludicrous clothing ... When he was supposed to be starting a militaristic revolution he was wearing evening dress and an ill-fitting black tailcoat ... and his army medals.

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.

My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known - not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.

On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101 times at 9 pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes.

The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.

Truth comes to us mediated by human love.

The scribbler's life is never done.

The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'

Reading about Queen Victoria has been a passion of mine since, as a child, I came across Laurence Housman's play 'Happy and Glorious,' with its Ernest Shepard illustrations.

I once asked Lady Moseley what she found so beguiling about Hitler's conversation. 'Oh, the jokes', she said at once.

We are not surprised at Romeo loving Juliet, though he is a Montague and she is a Capulet. But if we found in addition that Lady Capulet was by birth a Montague, that Lady Montague was a first cousin of old Capulet, that Mecutio was at once the nephew of a Capulet and the brother-in-law of a Montague, that count Paris was related on his father's side to one house and on his mother's side to the other, that Tybalt was Romeo's uncle's stepson and that the Friar who had married Romeo and Juliet was Juliet's uncle and Romeo's first cousin once removed, we would probably conclude that the feud between the two houses was being kept up for dramatic entertainment of the people of Verona.

It seems astonishing to be paid for indulging in pure pleasure. For me to go to Coburg is rather as if a trainspotter was sent for a few weeks to Swindon or a chocoholic asked on holiday by Green and Black.

The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.

Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.

This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.

It is the woman - nearly always - in spite of all the advances of modern feminism, who still takes responsibility for the bulk of the chores, as well as doing her paid job. This is true even in households where men try to be unselfish and to do their share.

Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.

It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

In the past, I used to counter any such notions by asking myself: 'Would you really want President Hattersley?' I now find that possibility rather cheers me up. With his chubby, Dickensian features and his knowledge of T.H. Green and other harmless leftish political classics, Hattersley might not be such a bad thing after all.

The monarchy, as Lord Esher, adviser to Edward VII and editor of Queen Victoria's early letters and journals, would later say, was exchanging 'authority' for 'influence'.3

I've got nothing very original to say myself.