All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit,...

I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble–because the Christ-life is...

Lead us not into temptation’ often means, among other things, ‘Deny me those gratifying invitations, those highly interesting contacts, that participation in the brilliant movements of our age, which I so often, at such risk,...

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

There may be two views about humans. But there’s no two views about things that look like humans and aren’t…But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and...

No net less wide than a man’s whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish.

When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more...

The author speculates that one of the differences between a fallen world and a restored one is that men will be able to say they have had enough and mean exactly that – rather than...

The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one’s own.

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion...

The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive...

When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamor of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely)...

By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a...

and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.

At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds....

It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.

We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love.

of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house.

The quality common to the three experiences… is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be...

Niceness’—wholesome, integrated personality—is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up ‘nice’; just as...

Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of “escape.”...

The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already… begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to...

And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the...

But I am inclined to think a Christian would be wise to avoid, where he decently can, any meeting with people who are bullies, lascivious, cruel, dishonest, spiteful and so forth.Not because we are “too...

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” C.S. Lewis

Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him-a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without...

We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage...

I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began

[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

If we are free to delete all inconvenient data we shall certainly have no theological difficulties; but for the same reason no solutions and no progress…. The troublesome fact, the apparent absurdity which can’t be...

The history of literature is very far from being one of simple progress.

Wouldn’t he know without being asked?’ said Polly. ‘I’ve no doubt he would,’ said the Horse (still with his mouth full). ‘But I’ve a sort of an idea he likes to be asked.

The expression on her face was noble. It was a great deal TOO noble.

The teaching of one true man will carry further and deeper then that would dozen white Babus.

the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.

I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on...

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

I do not think there is a demonstrative proof (like Euclid) of Christianity, nor of the existence of matter, nor of the good will and honesty of my best and oldest friends. I think all...

You can make anything out of writing.

Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.

The more imagination the reader has, being an untrained reader, the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that...

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians,...

Make no mistake,’ He says, ‘if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that....

The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for...