One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.

One never meets Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment as it comes… One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself.’ But we...

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also to receive the myth (the fact that what has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accorded to all myths....

Divine punishment are also mercies.

The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not.

When things go wrong, you’ll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.

As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise… For it...

Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.

When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to...

You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.

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.

A society which is predominantly Christian will propagate Christianity: One which is not, will not. We have, in the long run, little either to hope or to fear from government.

Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.

I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions – as if a man could adopt in it a preference to...

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get...

Pain provides an opportunity for heroism; the opportunity is seized with surprising frequency.

It would never occur to them to say at home (as pastors’ kids) anything they were really thinking, unless it is forced out of them by anger.

Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion. It has, and it’s taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred...

I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids.

Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape...

Christian” has an eulogistic rather than a descriptive sense: e.g. “Christian standards” means simply “high moral standards”. The presupposition “So-and-so is not a Christian” would only be taken to be a criticism of his behavior,...

compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is...

There are far better things ahead than any we live behind.

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...

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...

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.