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...

Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to believe in a certain way, and can’t really get rid of it.

By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.

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.

When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, “hullo! i’m growing up.” It...

I have been wandering to find him and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that he called me Beloved, me who...

There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will...

Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such,...

To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series – the plot, as we call it – is only really a new whereby to...

You have never talked to a mere mortal.

What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other.

Always winter but never Christmas.

We laymen may not be busier than the clergy but we usually have much less choice in our hours of business. The celebrant who lengthens the service by ten minutes may, for us, throw the...

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as...

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look...

That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in...

He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.

The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is...

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born...

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.-An Experiment in Criticism

Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator – to enact intellectually, volitionally and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature...

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to...

You are saying what is true, but you are not getting any further.

In other words, The­ol­ogy is prac­ti­cal: espe­cially now. In the old days, when there was less edu­ca­tion and dis­cus­sion, per­haps it was pos­si­ble to get on with a very few sim­ple ideas about God. But...

Man is to be understood only in his relation to God.

The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen...

But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to...