But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well...

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights...

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or...

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the...

Those who reject Christianity will not be moved by Christ’s statement that poverty is blessed. But here a rather remarkable fact comes to my aid. Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere...

Those who do not know that this great myth became Fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied. But Christians also need to be reminded – we may thank Corineus for reminding us...

Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold...

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn’t anyone?

I believe it all. If I seem not to, it is only that my joy is too great to let my belief settle itself.

For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.

On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet...

The symbol of a drama, a symphony, or a dance is useful to correct a certain absurdity which may arise if we talk too much of God planning and creating the world for good and...

In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.

As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something...

Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others… but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come...

Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which grow up ten years later into domestic hatred.

A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The...

I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do enter your...

I do love that tune – but really, I must go home. I only meant to stay for a few minutes.

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority.

Hate obscures all distinctions.

I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.

Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you...

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.

Something of God… flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.

But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history — that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes...

A Pagan is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. The post-Christian man differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin.

I knew the world too well to believe this sudden smiling. (…) The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We...

In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault.

You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you.

We might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbor as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself?Now that I come to think of...

We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We happen to have a body.

They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this? I don’t mean that I fear the worst of all. Nearly her last words...

The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.

A man may be ‘dated’ in the sense that the forms, the set-up, the paraphernalia, whereby he expresses the matter of permanent interest, are those of a particular age. In that sense the greatest writers...

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction...

When I was at school one would have said, ‘I swear by the Bible.’ But Bibles were not encouraged at Experiment House.

Another grave limitation of language is that it cannot, like music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However the words in a great poet’s phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind...

That is what it is! Drinkable light!

God has given to His works His own character of emeth; they are watertight, faithful, reliable, not at all vague or phantasmal.

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents...

When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind...

We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance,...

I do not see how we could have come to know the greatness of God without that hint furnished by the greatness of the material universe.

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the...

It is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him (the materialist). But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best on the market was...

When I began writing stories in exercise books I tried to put off all the things I really wanted to write about till at least the second page – I thought it would be like...