When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass – may pass in the first...

I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more...

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening...

We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form–something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One...

And that is just precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some...

No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil;...

If Christian teachers wish to recall Christian people to domesticity the first necessity is to stop telling lies about home life and to substitute realistic teaching.

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want...

So death lay in arrest. But at Bethlehem the bless’dNothing greater could be heardThan a dry wind in the thorn, the cry of the One new-born,And cattle in stall as they stirred.

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing...

Perhaps if Man is finally to know the bodiless, timeless, transcendent Ground of the whole universe not as a mere philosophical abstraction but as the Lord who, despite this transcendence, is “not far from any...

Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you…God will look to every soul like its first...

Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.

If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable.

At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts...

Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence, it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is...

When a man over forty tries to repent of the sins of England and to love her enemies, he is attempting something costly; for he was brought up to certain patriotic sentiments which cannot be...

Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a...

The author says the mark of a true rest your creature is an inability to be still without a kind of resignation.

I desired dragons with a profound desire.

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. IT is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are...

The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.

What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?

In my time I have heard two quite different arguments against my religion put forward in the name of science. When I was a youngster, people used to say that the universe was not only...

If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit...

But very quickly they all became grave again: for, as you know, there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

For us of course the shared activity and therefore the companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a...

Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning–either a terrifying one which...

Take from a man his freedom or his goods and you may have taken his innocence, almost his humanity, as well.

Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? “Nor does the being...

When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realises that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going — provided he does it for honesty’s sake and...

I am not a scholar of the past, but I am a lover of the past.

The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil’s whole structure away.

This shame has nothing to do with He or She. It’s the being mortal – how shall I say it? … insufficient.

Was joy created always to live under that threat? Always defenseless to those who would rather be miserable than have their self will be crossed? Can you really have thought that love and joy would...

When we carry out our “religious duties” we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last water comes, it may find them ready.

Grief … gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time....

My name also is Ransom,” said the Voice.

The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.

Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and...

It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix...

One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really...

Attempts to connect men’s circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful.

When we mention our personal opinions we must always make quite clear the difference between them and the Faith itself . . .

When the subject is sacred, proud and clever men may come to think that the outsiders who don’t know it are not merely inferior to them in skill but lower in God’s eyes; as the...