He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don’t agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take...

You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the “true” or “valid” experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you...

Now there are quite a lot of things which these two men could agree in doing for their fellow citizens. Both would approve of efficient sewers and hospitals and a healthy diet. But sooner or...

We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a...

No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never...

Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future.

You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made ‘realizations’ the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying...

Now, in the clear light of an accepted duty, he felt fear indeed, but with it a sober sense of confidence in himself and in the world, and even an element of pleasure. It was...

If we could see things from a sufficient height above we should all realize that we are in fact proper objects of pity.

The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude with regards children in the raw as a sort of raw material which we must handle.

I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular...

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

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.

Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary. He told us to be not only ‘as harmless as doves’, but also ‘as wise as serpents’. He wants a child’s...

Now it is time!” then louder, “Time!”; and then so loud it could have shaken the stars; “TIME.” The door flew open.

If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.

It is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, ‘You must do this. I can’t.

The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though...

I ended my first book with the words ‘no answer.’ I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?...

They say, ‘The coward dies many times’; so does the beloved. Didn’t the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?

[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs...

destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time, which they call the Present. For the Present is the...

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator...