On avoiding the darker side of life in educational literature for children: “There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the atomic bomb. Since it is likely that they will meet cruel enemies, but then at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you...

No time for better words, no time to unsay anything.-Til We Have Faces

It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.

Even I never dreamed of Magic like this!

You must not suppose that this was a romantic passion. The passion of my life, as the next chapter will show, belonged to a wholly different region. What I felt for the dancing mistress was sheer appetite; the prose, not the poetry, of the Flesh.

When I began writing stories and 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 wouldn’t be like a grown-up but if it became interesting at once.

Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that is the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying.

The experience of a miracle means we must recognize that the data offered by our senses recur in regular pattern.

You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.

I do not expect old heads on young shoulders.

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

Then Hwin, though shaking all over, gave a strange little neigh and trotted across to the Lion. “Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.

I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the...

Friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why...

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying...

I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.

Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature’s apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on.

Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.

I felt sure that [Oyarsa] was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed.

For the entrance is low: we must stoop till we are no taller than children to get in.

Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner...

When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then – that is the real meeting. The other...

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time....

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded,...

I had rather that the human race, having a certain quality in their lives, should continue for only a few centuries than that, losing freedom, friendship, dignity, and mercy, and learning to be quite content without them, they should continue for millions of millennia.

The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.

We are what we believe we are.

Being what we are, rational but also animate, amphibians who start from the world of sense and proceed through myth and metaphor to the world of spirit. I do not see how we could have come to know the greatness of God without that hint that furnished by the greatness of the material universe.

It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.

I have been talking of the past (your past and mine) only in order that you may turn from it forever. One wrench and the tooth will be out. You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.

For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.

On the other hand, all those doubts which I had felt before I entered the cottage as to whether these creatures were friend of foe, and whether Ransom were a pioneer or a dupe, had for the moment vanished. My fear was now of another kind. I felt sure that he creature was what we...

It has always been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but it is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.

The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet...

Mortality rose.

don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously’. Apparently it’s like that. Your bid – for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity – will not be serious if nothing much is staked on...

A clever schoolboy’s reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.

The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

The literary man re-reads, other men simply read.

But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder.

No llegaremos nunca a conseguir una sociedad cristiana hasta que la mayoría de nosotros lo desee de verdad. Y no lo desearemos de verdad hasta que nos hagamos totalmente cristianos.

A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed.

Gran parte de una desgracia cualquiera consiste, por así decirlo, en la sombra de la desgracia, en la reflexión sobre ella. Es decir en el hecho de que no se limite uno a sufrir, sino que se vea obligado a seguir considerando el hecho de que sufre.

Writing for children “compels you to throw all the force of the book into what was done and said. It checks what a kind, but discerning critic called ‘the expository demon’ in me.