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.

He is that Object to admire which (or, if you like, to appreciate which) is simply to be awake, to have entered the real world; not to appreciate which is to have lost the greatest...

There is only One on record who has practiced Christianity in every respect at every moment of his life – Christ himself. In that sense, there are no practicing Christians, but only Christians who, in...

Every citizen has to guess the value of the gift which every friend will send him so that he may send one of equal value, whether he can afford it or not.

Being what we are, rational but also animate, amphibians who start from the world of sense and proceed through myth and metaphor to the world of spirit. I do not see how we could have...

It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.

I have been talking of the past (your past and mine) only in order that you may turn from it forever. One wrench and the tooth will be out. You can begin as if nothing...

For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.

On the other hand, all those doubts which I had felt before I entered the cottage as to whether these creatures were friend of foe, and whether Ransom were a pioneer or a dupe, had...

It has always been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but it is usually much easier and...

Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.

The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that...

Mortality rose.

don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously’. Apparently it’s like that. Your bid – for God or no God, for a good God...

A clever schoolboy’s reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…

People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.

If you are writing a story, miracles or abnormal events may be bad art, or they may not. If, for example, you are writing an ordinary realistic novel and have got your characters into a...

Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true....

This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we–even our poets and musicians and inventors–never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials...

When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being much...

Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver. ‘Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe, but he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.

You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspect,’ is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in...

But there is another way of using the equivalence, which is almost the opposite of allegory, and which I would call sacramentalism or symbolism. If our passions, being immaterial, can be copied by material inventions,...

The vocabulary of endearment, complaint, and abuse, provides, I think, almost the only specimens of words that are purely emotional, words from which all imaginative or conceptual content has vanished, so that they have no...