I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.

You will find that your library in Heaven contains only some of the books you had on Earth, the ones you gave away or lent.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which...

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe -no more than the architect of a house could actually be...

we (modern society) make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen it long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my...

Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

He may really have been enjoying an embryonic composition of his own stimulated by mere hints in the book.

If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the...

Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.

And (Tirian) called out “Aslan! Aslan! Aslan! Come and help us now.”But the darkness and the cold and the quietness went on just the same.”Let me be killed,” cried the King. “I ask nothing for...

I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city....

Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with the vast continent we really belong to.

In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.

By the way, don’t ‘weep inwardly’ and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we – and especially, my sex – don’t cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and...

The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one’s post as a child of God, living each day as...

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Even if the two lovers are mature and experienced people who know that broken hearts heal in the end and can clearly foresee that, if they once steeled themselves to go through the present agony...

It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of te chest beneath that makes...

He has caught me using the word “literally” where I did not really mean it, a vile journalistic cliché which he cannot possibly reprobate more severely than I do myself.

Although he didn’t care much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks (grades or comparisons).

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,…Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.

There are no real personalities apart from God. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most ‘natural’ men,...

I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people)...

The trap I remember forever: how they got out I have long since forgotten.

For agnosticism is, in a sense, what I am preaching. I do not wish to reduce the sceptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the...

It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.

The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and...

In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the...

The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just...

Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is...

We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.

You can make anything by writing.

You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” said the Lion.

Once when I had remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, “Yes. But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs.

When you painted on earth – at least in your earlier days – it was because you caught glimpses of heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others...

[B]ut in Narnia your good clothes were never your uncomfortable ones. They knew how to make things that felt beautiful as well as looking beautiful in Narnia; and there was no such thing as starch...

But supposing God became a man – suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person – then that person could help us. He could surrender His...

The more I resist [Christ] and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call...

That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.

No people find each other more absurd than lovers

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

Like all philosophers, Aristotle gives words the definitions which will be most useful for his own purpose

Mathematicians, astronomers, and physicists are oftenreligious, even mystical; biologists much less often; economists and psychologists very seldom indeed. It is as their subject matter comes nearer to man himself that their antireligious bias hardens.

It is at this hour that I am in my right mind: it is all the rest of the day that I am enchanted.

Then Caspian caught up a battle-axe and rushed upon the Lord Drinian to kill him, and Drinian stood still as a stock for the death blow. But when the axe was raised, Caspian suddenly threw...