Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!

Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself. In reality, because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must, even more wholeheartedly than they, invoke the divine protection...

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God...

You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything,...

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility…According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger,...

[The devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs–pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies...

But, of course, what mattered most of all was my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word INTERFERENCE. But Christianity placed at...

this is a book about something

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find...

What really matters is:—1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.2. Always prefer the plain direct word to...

One reason why the Enemy found this so easy was that, without knowing it, I was already desperately anxious to get rid of my religion; and that for a reason worth recording. By a sheer...

Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others...

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present...

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that…. The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to...

Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out…

Looking for God—or Heaven—by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare’s plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters.

Experience by itself proves nothing. If a man doubts whether he is sleeping or waking, no experiment can solve his doubt, since every experiment may itself be part of the dream. Experience proves this, or...

Any amount of theology can be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without them knowing it.

Periods’ are largely an invention of the historians. The poetsthemselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see...

God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.

The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics.

While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is the best.

I was not born to be free—I was born to adore and obey.

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up,...

He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true’ or ‘false’, but as ‘academic’ or practical’, ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t...

[Death] is a safety-device because, once Man has fallen, natural immortality would be the one utterly hopeless destiny for him.

To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator. When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now....

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’s the whole art and joy of words.

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til...

Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see…...

I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill. Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion.Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer.”I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”There is no...

Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self.

I believe in Christ like I believe in the sun – not because I can see it, but by it I can see everything else.

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply...

I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside of their special subject.

Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.

And there lies the deadly error. Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else-whether a distance mountain, or the past, or the golds of Asgard-does the “thrill” arise. It is a...

In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job–where the machine seems to run on much as usual–I loath the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a...

Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore...

Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong...

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of...

The Divine “goodness” differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different; it differs from ours not as white from black, but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel....

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of...

Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny…

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a...

No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was...