I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own...

If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven; if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.

I believe that I am mad,” said Vertue presently. “The world cannot be as it seems to be. If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it:...

Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about.

The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first – wanting to be the centre – wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan:...

All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no...

All science is based on observation: all our observations are taken DURING Humpty Dumpty’s fall, because we were born after he lost his seat on the wall and shall be extinct long before he reaches...

To be God – to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response – to be miserable – these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the...

Nearly all our older poetry was written and read by men to whom the distinction between poetry and rhetoric, in its modern form, would have been meaningless. The ‘beauties’ which they chiefly regarded in every...

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

If on the other hand we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read...

He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.

I have now lived a hundred and nine winters in this world and have never yet met any such thing as Luck. There is something about all this that I do not understand: but if...

You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan. “And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the...

Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry...

I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him...

The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.

The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty.

God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man...

While we are actually subjected to them, the ‘moods’ and ‘spirits’ of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must...

I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to...

Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into...

Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.

A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

Evil can be undone, but it cannot “develop” into good

If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were educated. But a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. Good philosophy must exist,...

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you...

Thank Heaven,” thought Ransom, “he is only teaching her vanity”; for he and feared something worse. Yet could it be possible, in the long run, to wear clothes without learning modesty, and through modesty lasciviousness?

Miracles are (in late documents, I believe) recorded of the Buddha. But what could be more absurd than that he who came to teach us that Nature is an illusion from which we must escape...

My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from...

One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.

One never meets Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment as it comes… One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself.’ But we...

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

To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also to receive the myth (the fact that what has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accorded to all myths....

Divine punishment are also mercies.

The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not.

When things go wrong, you’ll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.

As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise… For it...

Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.

When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to...

You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.

The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.

A society which is predominantly Christian will propagate Christianity: One which is not, will not. We have, in the long run, little either to hope or to fear from government.