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...

When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.

Heaven forbid that I should regard the limitation of my sympathy as anything save a red light which warns me not to criticize at all.

The Guide laughed. “You are falling into their own error,” he said, “the change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught—an inability...

He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He...

What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the...

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely

If you want religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity. I am certain there must be a patent American article on the market which will suit you far better, but...

For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.

We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.

The more imagination the reader has, being an untrained reader, the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that...

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians,...

Make no mistake,’ He says, ‘if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that....

The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for...

We are inveterate poets. Our imaginations awake. Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality – the sublime. Unless this were so, the merely arithmetical greatness of the galaxy would be no more impressive...

The real pacificus is he who promotes peace, not he who gasses about it.

I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of the State? You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common...

I gather they are even vaguely pacifist, not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of purely fashionable...

To think of our prayers as just ‘causes’ would suggest that the whole importance of petitionary prayer lay in the achievement of the thing asked for. But really, for our spiritual life as a whole,...

We all have different languages; but we all really mean the same thing.

One way or another the thing had to die. Perpetual springtime is not allowed. You were not cutting the wood of life according to the grain.

And guard you well from violent menWho’d put you back in the shafts again.”But the ass had far too wise a headTo answer one of the things I said,So he twitched his fair ears up...

The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the...

I know all about the repair of overcoming chronic temptations. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience etc. don’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo...

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church – read on – and give his life for her (Eph. V,...

This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there...

On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be...

A simpler form of the same objection consists in saying that death ought not to be final, that there ought to be a second chance. I believe that if a million chances were likely to...

… the very last thing I want to do is to unsettle in the mind of any Christian, whatever his denomination, the concepts — for him traditional — by which he finds it profitable to...

We call bad one who rejects the fruit he is given for the fruit he is expecting or the fruit he was given last time.

The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)…

Of course, I quiet agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable discomfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay and it is no...

Once very near the end I said, ‘If you can — if it is allowed — come to me when I too am on my death bed.’ ‘Allowed!’ she said. ‘Heaven would have a job...

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing – or should we say “seeing”? there are no tenses...

It was obvious to Aristotle that most things which move do so because some other moving object impels them. A hand, itself in motion, moves a sword; a wind, itself in motion, moves a ship....

the difference between the old and the new education being) in a word, the old was a kind of propagation – men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”

We are defending Christianity; not “my religion”. When we mention our personal opinions we must always make quite clear the difference between them and the Faith itself.

If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

And above all, you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling…the question should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but...

If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of...

The peculiarity of the Christian faith is not to teach this doctrine but to render it, in various ways, more tolerable. Christianity teaches us that the terrible task has already in some sense been accomplished...

But I want her, I must have her, I shall die if I do not get her – false, proud, black-hearted daughter of a dog that she is! I cannot sleep and my food has...

The alternative to rule is not freedom but the unconstitutional (and often unconscious) tyranny of the most selfish member.

Where they (modern books) are true they will give us truths we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is...