We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We happen to have a body.

They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this? I don’t mean that I fear the worst of all. Nearly her last words...

The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.

A man may be ‘dated’ in the sense that the forms, the set-up, the paraphernalia, whereby he expresses the matter of permanent interest, are those of a particular age. In that sense the greatest writers...

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction...

When I was at school one would have said, ‘I swear by the Bible.’ But Bibles were not encouraged at Experiment House.

Another grave limitation of language is that it cannot, like music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However the words in a great poet’s phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind...

That is what it is! Drinkable light!

God has given to His works His own character of emeth; they are watertight, faithful, reliable, not at all vague or phantasmal.

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents...

When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind...

We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance,...

I do not see how we could have come to know the greatness of God without that hint furnished by the greatness of the material universe.

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the...

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.

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...

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...

I wanted not the momentary suspense but the whole world to which it belonged.

Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles.

I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,And when he shakes his mane, we shall have...

I wish I had never been born,” she said. “What are we born for?” “For infinite happiness,” said the Spirit. “You can step out into it at any moment…