You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December...

Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we rceive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best–if you like, it ‘works’ best–when,...

When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was — gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on...

How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me. Poi...

They call him Aslan in That Place,” said Eustace.”What a curious name!””Not half so curious as himself,” said Eustace solemnly.

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot...

I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so...

Friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him...

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if...

I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.

Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature’s...

Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.

I felt sure that [Oyarsa] was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed.

For the entrance is low: we must stoop till we are no taller than children to get in.

Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is...

When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down...

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything....

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in...

I had rather that the human race, having a certain quality in their lives, should continue for only a few centuries than that, losing freedom, friendship, dignity, and mercy, and learning to be quite content...

The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.

We are what we believe we are.

On avoiding the darker side of life in educational literature for children: “There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the atomic bomb. Since it is likely...

No time for better words, no time to unsay anything.-Til We Have Faces

It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.

Even I never dreamed of Magic like this!

You must not suppose that this was a romantic passion. The passion of my life, as the next chapter will show, belonged to a wholly different region. What I felt for the dancing mistress was...

When I began writing stories and exercise books I tried to put off all the things I really wanted to write about till at least the second page. I thought it wouldn’t be like a...

Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what...

The experience of a miracle means we must recognize that the data offered by our senses recur in regular pattern.

You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.

I do not expect old heads on young shoulders.

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

Then Hwin, though shaking all over, gave a strange little neigh and trotted across to the Lion. “Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I’d sooner be eaten by...

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the...

The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

The literary man re-reads, other men simply read.

But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder.

No llegaremos nunca a conseguir una sociedad cristiana hasta que la mayoría de nosotros lo desee de verdad. Y no lo desearemos de verdad hasta que nos hagamos totalmente cristianos.

A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part...

Gran parte de una desgracia cualquiera consiste, por así decirlo, en la sombra de la desgracia, en la reflexión sobre ella. Es decir en el hecho de que no se limite uno a sufrir, sino...

Writing for children “compels you to throw all the force of the book into what was done and said. It checks what a kind, but discerning critic called ‘the expository demon’ in me.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put...

The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.

I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.

Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling… we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of...

The master demon Screwtape identifies elitist humanity’s tendency toward “an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men.