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...

Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St Luke or St Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Butler, but (contemporary...

It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal’s voice for a god’s. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god’s voice takes...

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

We are what we believe we are!

For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many...

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the...

What “inspires” my books? Really I don’t know. Does anyone know where exactly an idea comes from? With me all fiction begins with pictures in my head. But where the pictures come from I couldn’t...

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

A new book is still on trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages and all...

The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one...

…And in prayer this real I struggles to speak, for once from his being, and to address, for once, not the other actors, but–what shall I call Him? the Author, for He invented us all?...

Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet...

My heart is broken.

The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards … was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of...

We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he...

When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the...

Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.

When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully...

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the ris- ing generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters’ side, but in fact I have been far more...

I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once...

Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.

One of the advantages of having a written and printed service, is that it enables you to see when people’s feelings and thoughts have changed. When people begin to find the words of our service...

Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.

In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine describes the desolation into which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him. Then he draws a moral. This is what comes, he...

Have you no idea of progress, of development?””I have seen them both in an egg,” said Caspian. “We call it ‘Going Bad’ in Narnia

The distinction between natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down; and when it had done so, the burden of intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us by dividing it into two halves and encouraging...

And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till...

When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises...

The death of a beloved is an amputation.

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector.

In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few subjects. No one...

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you...

I haven’t any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring...

Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the...

How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that...

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it isn’t. We can’t compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We’re dealing with...

Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure.