Luke Mohan’s Reviews > Ronald Knox: A Biography > Status Update

you [God], who need nobody’s service, can use anybody’s. So I would ask that, among all the millions of souls you cherish, some few, upon the occasion of reading it, may learn to understand you a little, and to love you much.

…partings are unsatisfactory things and perhaps best done without. Please ask our Lord to let me have the gift of perseverance.

The Daily Sketch wanted to send a man to take photographs of me working in my study. I wrote back and said I hadn’t a study and didn’t do any work.

I want to write other things, and if possible put up some kind of barrage against this revolting age.

There is a sense…in which it can be said that for 350 years Oxford and Cambridge (and Oxford especially) we’re the Church of England; that the secularization of the Universities, an inevitable though long-postponed consequence of the Reformation, was national apostasy.

It is a pity if these [pre-converts] go away with a sense that our prayer-idiom is something much inferior to their own, and that our priests rattle off the service as if conscious that it had no beauty of language to recommend it.

He liked good wine and had the worst.

It would have suited many of the younger dons better to see the Church still represented by a genial and picturesque anachronism than by a sounder scholar and sharper wit than themselves.

Through all the time when his eager, questing, sceptical mind was exploring and experimenting he remained steadfast in his religious practices and increasingly obsessed by the minutiae of ritual and theology.

He was later rather doubtful of the value of those debates. They trained a man, he thought, to leave the obvious unsaid even to the detriment of truth; to prefer the ingenious and extravagant to the sound argument; to compromise with reason. They removed rhetoric from its true function as the art of persuasion, and made it the art of entertaining conversation.