I have come,” said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with...

Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.

Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends – comrades – do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives...

Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that...

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

The world of ‘broad-mindedness’ and watered-down ‘religion’ is a world where a small number of people (all the same type) say totally different things and change their minds every few minutes.

raged for three days here in Charn it­self. For three days I looked down upon it from this very spot. I did not use my power till the last of my sol­diers had fallen, and...

The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists...

The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.

Our struggle is–isn’t it?–to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are...

But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body...

God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but...

Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next.

True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the...

Tea should be taken in solitude.

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

Primary Epic is great, but not with the greatness of the later kind. In Homer, its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux. It is all...

You all know,” said the Guide, “that security is mortals’ greatest enemy.

The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.

Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you. What are you afraid of? Has this world been so kind to you that you...

Christianity does NOT replace the technical. When he tells you to feed the hungry and doesn’t give you lessons in cookery. If you want to learn THAT, you must go to a cook rather than...

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no...

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self–all your wishes and precautions–to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what...

The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has...

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Johnson, who defines poetry as ‘metrical composition’, defines poet as ‘An inventor; an author of fiction; a writer of poems; one who writes in measure’. We can gauge how far we have traveled by comparing...

All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen it long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my...

Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

He may really have been enjoying an embryonic composition of his own stimulated by mere hints in the book.

If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the...

Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.

And (Tirian) called out “Aslan! Aslan! Aslan! Come and help us now.”But the darkness and the cold and the quietness went on just the same.”Let me be killed,” cried the King. “I ask nothing for...

I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city....

Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with the vast continent we really belong to.

In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.

By the way, don’t ‘weep inwardly’ and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we – and especially, my sex – don’t cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and...

The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one’s post as a child of God, living each day as...

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Even if the two lovers are mature and experienced people who know that broken hearts heal in the end and can clearly foresee that, if they once steeled themselves to go through the present agony...

It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of te chest beneath that makes...

He has caught me using the word “literally” where I did not really mean it, a vile journalistic cliché which he cannot possibly reprobate more severely than I do myself.

Although he didn’t care much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks (grades or comparisons).

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,…Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.

There are no real personalities apart from God. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most ‘natural’ men,...

I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people)...