Now we cannot…discover our failure to keep God’s law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds...

Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would he also be “reasonable” […]

…the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force...

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it...

Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to avow them and half doubtful if they can after all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in half...

There are two musical situations on which I think we can be confident that a blessing rests. One is where a priest or an organist, himself a man of trained and delicate taste, humbly and...

A dream, strayed into daylight.

A man who first tried to guess ‘what the public wants,’ and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave

If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would...

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it...

Do you mean to say,” asked Caspian, “that you three come from a round world (round like a ball) and you’ve never told me! It’s really too bad for you. Because we have fairy-tales in...

Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in...

And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.

Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will...

For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common senesce.

I can answer that only by hearsay,” returned the Guide, “for pain is a secret which he has shared with your race and not with mine; and you would find it as hard to explain...

We appear to be saying something very important aboutsomething: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.

Humans are amphibians…half spirit and half animal…as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies,...

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it...

If any man is tempted to think – as one might be tempted to who read only contemporaries – that “Christianity” is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he...

It may hurt, you know”—even so, sir.

What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive… An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men’s fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are...

Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.

We love and reason because God Loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.

You can get second things only by putting first things first,

Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion.”I am dying of thirst,” said Jill.”Then drink,” said the Lion.”May I — could I — would you mind going away while I do?” said Jill.The Lion answered this...

Daughter,” said the Hermit, “I have now lived a hundred and nine winters in this world and have never met any such thing as Luck.

Do not dare not to dare.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s...

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what...

In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that...

If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is...

Do you see the same truth?” – or at least, “Do you care about the same truth?” The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can...

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our...

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer....

You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues.

The real reason, I take it, why you cannot be in communion with us is not your disagreement with this or that particular Protestant doctrine, so much as the absence of any real ‘Doctrine’, in...

Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to...

For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there’s hunger in the land (as must be now and...

When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains. (…) The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure. (…) My point is that those...

As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist — making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the...

I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been born in God’s thought, and then made by God is the...

You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.

When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. A...

OxfordIt is well that there are palaces of peaceAnd discipline and dreaming and desire,Lest we forget our heritage and ceaseThe Spirit’s work—to hunger and aspire:Lest we forget that we were born divine,Now tangled in red...

We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God’s feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God’s share in it is felt as a tribute which we must...

Every desire must be criticized by the whole Man.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

Love is the great conqueror of lust.