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...

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...

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)...

The trap I remember forever: how they got out I have long since forgotten.

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.

You will find that your library in Heaven contains only some of the books you had on Earth, the ones you gave away or lent.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which...

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe -no more than the architect of a house could actually be...

we (modern society) make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

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.

The more I resist [Christ] and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call...

That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.

No people find each other more absurd than lovers

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

Like all philosophers, Aristotle gives words the definitions which will be most useful for his own purpose

Mathematicians, astronomers, and physicists are oftenreligious, even mystical; biologists much less often; economists and psychologists very seldom indeed. It is as their subject matter comes nearer to man himself that their antireligious bias hardens.

It is at this hour that I am in my right mind: it is all the rest of the day that I am enchanted.

Then Caspian caught up a battle-axe and rushed upon the Lord Drinian to kill him, and Drinian stood still as a stock for the death blow. But when the axe was raised, Caspian suddenly threw...

People say, “The Church ought to give us a lead.” That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if the mean it in the wrong way. By the Church they...

Oh, come on, Pole, buck up. After all, it is an adventure.