Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.If you are on the wrong road,...

When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter.

People shouldn’t call for demons unless they really mean what they say.

I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while...

All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.

Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness...

Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can’t see it. So quietly submit to be painted—i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well...

It was too perfect to last,’ so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic – as if God no sooner saw...

You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is...

and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good, to do something to us or make us something. Hence the new name “leaders” for those who...

We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards...

I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the...

In Book III, which deals with morals, I have also passed over some things but for a different reason. Ever since I served as an infantryman in the First World War, I have had a...

The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the nature of...

It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.

He values home as the place where he can “be himself” in the sense of trampling on all the restraints which civilized humanity has found to be indispensable for tolerable social intercourse.

The idea only true or right “meaning” would be that shared by the largest number of the best readers after repeated and careful readings over several generations, different periods, nationalities, moods, degrees of alertness, private...

He builds whole world of imagery and passion, any one of which would have served another writer for a whole book, only to pull each of them to pieces and pour scorn on it.

The New Testament writers speak as if Christ’s achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the ‘first fruits,’ the pioneer...

So dim below these symbols show,Bony and abstract every one.Yet if true verse but lift the curse,They feel in dreams their native Sun.

When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good...

I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; it adds to its commands “Thus saith the Lord”, it lies, and lies dangerously.

All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit,...

I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble–because the Christ-life is...

Lead us not into temptation’ often means, among other things, ‘Deny me those gratifying invitations, those highly interesting contacts, that participation in the brilliant movements of our age, which I so often, at such risk,...

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

There may be two views about humans. But there’s no two views about things that look like humans and aren’t…But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and...

No net less wide than a man’s whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish.

When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more...

The author speculates that one of the differences between a fallen world and a restored one is that men will be able to say they have had enough and mean exactly that – rather than...

The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one’s own.

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion...

The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive...

When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamor of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely)...

By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a...

Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.

At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds....

It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.

We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love.

of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house.

The quality common to the three experiences… is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be...

Niceness’—wholesome, integrated personality—is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up ‘nice’; just as...

Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of “escape.”...

The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already… begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to...

And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the...

But I am inclined to think a Christian would be wise to avoid, where he decently can, any meeting with people who are bullies, lascivious, cruel, dishonest, spiteful and so forth.Not because we are “too...

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.