By the way I also would say “I got a book.” But your teacher and I are not “English teachers” in the same sense. She has to put across an idea of what the English...

The question has become whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of technology without losing all personal privacy and independence.

I reject at once an idea which lingers in the mind of some modern people that cultural activities are in their own right spiritual and meritorious — as though scholars and poets were intrinsically more...

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which...

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it…...

If only you and I (or you or I) doesn’t go and die before we have a chance to meet! And yet, if we did no doubt there would be some good and loving reason...

God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

I have come,” said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with...

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…

People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.

If you are writing a story, miracles or abnormal events may be bad art, or they may not. If, for example, you are writing an ordinary realistic novel and have got your characters into a...

Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true....

This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we–even our poets and musicians and inventors–never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials...

When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being much...

Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver. ‘Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe, but he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.

You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspect,’ is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in...

But there is another way of using the equivalence, which is almost the opposite of allegory, and which I would call sacramentalism or symbolism. If our passions, being immaterial, can be copied by material inventions,...

The vocabulary of endearment, complaint, and abuse, provides, I think, almost the only specimens of words that are purely emotional, words from which all imaginative or conceptual content has vanished, so that they have no...

The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the ‘gospel’ or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the ‘gospels’, the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death, were composed later for the benefit of...

And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician’s Book.

Now it seems to me that we often make a mistake both about God’s forgiveness of our sins and about the forgiveness we are told to offer to other people’s sins. Take it first about...

All the practical principles behind the Innovator’s case for posterity, or society, or the species, are there from time immemorial in the Tao. But they are nowhere else. Unless you accept these without question as...

One of the drawbacks about adventures is that when you come to the most beautiful places you are often too anxious and hurried to appreciate them.

If you read history you will find that the Christians begin the most for the present world are just the ones that thought the most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot....

But of course these conjectures as to why God does what He does are probably of no more value than my dog’s ideas of what I am up to when I sit and read.

I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through...

If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will,...

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling...

If we cannot persuade our friends by reasons we must be content “and not bring a mercenary army to our aid” (He meant passions.)

To think that the spectre you see is an illusion does not rob him of his terrors: it simply adds the further terror of madness itself – and then on top of that the horrible...

Christianity does NOT replace the technical. When he tells you to feed the hungry and doesn’t give you lessons in cookery. If you want to learn THAT, you must go to a cook rather than...

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no...

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self–all your wishes and precautions–to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what...

The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has...

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Johnson, who defines poetry as ‘metrical composition’, defines poet as ‘An inventor; an author of fiction; a writer of poems; one who writes in measure’. We can gauge how far we have traveled by comparing...

Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.

Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends – comrades – do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives...

Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that...

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

The world of ‘broad-mindedness’ and watered-down ‘religion’ is a world where a small number of people (all the same type) say totally different things and change their minds every few minutes.

raged for three days here in Charn it­self. For three days I looked down upon it from this very spot. I did not use my power till the last of my sol­diers had fallen, and...

The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists...

The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.

Our struggle is–isn’t it?–to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are...

But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body...

God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but...