If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

Sentimentality is so apt to creep in if we write at length about children as seen by their elders. And the reality of childhood, as we all experienced it, creeps out. For we all remember...

It’s not a question of God `sending’ us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or...

God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.

Whatever else humanism is, it is emphatically not a movement towards freedom and expansion. It is the impulse of men who feel themselves simple, rustic, and immature, towards sophistication, urbanity, and ripeness. In a word,...

Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. … We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He...

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

…You won’t get eternal life by just feeling the presence of God in flowers or music.

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely...

Nothing is yet in its true form.

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,And field, and forest, as they wereReflected in a single mind)Like cast off clothes was left behindIn ashes, yet with hopes that she,Re-born from holy poverty,In lenten lands, hereafter...

Now we cannot…discover our failure to keep God’s law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds...

Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would he also be “reasonable” […]

…the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force...

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.

There are two musical situations on which I think we can be confident that a blessing rests. One is where a priest or an organist, himself a man of trained and delicate taste, humbly and...

A dream, strayed into daylight.

A man who first tried to guess ‘what the public wants,’ and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave

If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would...

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it...

Do you mean to say,” asked Caspian, “that you three come from a round world (round like a ball) and you’ve never told me! It’s really too bad for you. Because we have fairy-tales in...

Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in...

And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.

Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will...

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

I can answer that only by hearsay,” returned the Guide, “for pain is a secret which he has shared with your race and not with mine; and you would find it as hard to explain...

We appear to be saying something very important aboutsomething: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.

Humans are amphibians…half spirit and half animal…as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies,...

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it...

If any man is tempted to think – as one might be tempted to who read only contemporaries – that “Christianity” is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he...

It may hurt, you know”—even so, sir.

What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive… An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men’s fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are...

Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.

We love and reason because God Loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.

You can get second things only by putting first things first,

Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion.”I am dying of thirst,” said Jill.”Then drink,” said the Lion.”May I — could I — would you mind going away while I do?” said Jill.The Lion answered this...

Daughter,” said the Hermit, “I have now lived a hundred and nine winters in this world and have never met any such thing as Luck.

Do not dare not to dare.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s...

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what...

In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that...

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it...

Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to avow them and half doubtful if they can after all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in half...

Do you see the same truth?” – or at least, “Do you care about the same truth?” The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can...

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our...

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer....

You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues.

The real reason, I take it, why you cannot be in communion with us is not your disagreement with this or that particular Protestant doctrine, so much as the absence of any real ‘Doctrine’, in...