I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking “But I never knew before. I never dreamed….” I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own...

The possibility of pain is inherent in the very existence of a world where souls can meet. When souls become wicked they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one another; and this, perhaps, accounts...

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient book should be read only by the professionals, and the amateur should content himself with modern books.

The (children’s) book is a specimen of the most scandalous escapism: it paints a happiness under incompatible conditions – the sort of freedom we can have only in childhood and the sort we can have...

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is...

I was still young and the whole world of beauty was opening before me, my own officious obstructions were often swept aside and, startled into self-forgetfulness, I again tasted Joy. … One thing, however, I...

I believe in God like I believe in the sun, not because I can see it, but because of it all things are seen.

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling action after action had...

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

You describe your Wonderful Night very well. That is, you describe the place & the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well—but not the thing itself—the setting but not the...

Every story of conversion is a story of blessed defeat.

And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to do another and harder...

Dicen que los cobardes mueren muchas veces: eso les pasa a los seres amados.

Emeth came walking forward into the open strip of grass between the bonfire and the Stable. His eyes were shining, his face was solemn, his hand was on his sword-hilt, and he carried his head...

Some think it the historian’s business to penetrate beyond this apparent confusion and heterogeneity, and to grasp in a single intuition the ‘spirit’ or ‘meaning’ of his period. With some hesitation, and with much respect...

You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the ‘best’ people, the ‘right’ food, the ‘important’ books. I have known a human...

A character began to speculate whether the incessant drive to have things over again might be the root of all evil.

It is clear that Christianity does not exclude any of the ordinary human activities. St. Paul tells people to get on with their jobs. He even assumes that Christians may go to dinner parties, and,...

El amor empieza a ser un demonio desde el momento en que comienza a ser un dios.

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.

I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular...

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

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.

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.

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...