Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning–either a terrifying one which...

Take from a man his freedom or his goods and you may have taken his innocence, almost his humanity, as well.

Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? “Nor does the being...

When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realises that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going — provided he does it for honesty’s sake and...

I am not a scholar of the past, but I am a lover of the past.

The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil’s whole structure away.

This shame has nothing to do with He or She. It’s the being mortal – how shall I say it? … insufficient.

Was joy created always to live under that threat? Always defenseless to those who would rather be miserable than have their self will be crossed? Can you really have thought that love and joy would...

When we carry out our “religious duties” we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last water comes, it may find them ready.

Grief … gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time....

My name also is Ransom,” said the Voice.

The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.

Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and...

It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix...

One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really...

Attempts to connect men’s circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful.

When we mention our personal opinions we must always make quite clear the difference between them and the Faith itself . . .

When the subject is sacred, proud and clever men may come to think that the outsiders who don’t know it are not merely inferior to them in skill but lower in God’s eyes; as the...

Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St Luke or St Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Butler, but (contemporary...

It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal’s voice for a god’s. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god’s voice takes...

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

We are what we believe we are!

For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many...

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the...

What “inspires” my books? Really I don’t know. Does anyone know where exactly an idea comes from? With me all fiction begins with pictures in my head. But where the pictures come from I couldn’t...