The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. They cannot sound otherwise to those who have not had the...

see” beauty — though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive...

And there, right in the middle of it, I find ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.’ There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other...

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

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.

[M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic”...

But in Friendship, being free of all that, we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the...

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an...

Creatures, I give you yourselves,” said the strong, happy voice of Aslan. “I give to you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the stars...

I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through...

The present state of the world is normal; it with the last (19th) century that with the abnormality.

A man who admits that dwarfs and giants and talking beasts and witches are still dear to him in his 50-third year is now less likely to be praised for his perennial youth than scorned...

Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.

This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!

happen to be there.” Made forus? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

They say an unhappy man wants distractions-something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and...

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness – the desire to see...

All literature becomes a sacred text.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

Now obviously all this–taking upon oneself to hate those whom one things God’s enemies, avoiding the society of those one thinks wicked, judging our neighbors, thinking oneself “too good” for some of them (not in...

Amar é, sempre, ser vulnerável. Para que nunca se sofra com isso, aconselha-se não se amar algo, ou mesmo, alguém. Se sugere proteger a si mesmo nos próprios hobbies, mimos e zelos, evitar qualquer envolvimento...

If you are foe, we do not fear you. If you are friend, your foes will be taught the fear of us.

Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle...

For the critics who think Chesterton frivolous or ‘paradoxical’ I have to work hard to feel even pity; sympathy is out of the question.

Sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bribed. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation...

It is very bad to reach the stage of thinking deeply and frequently about duty unless you are prepared to go a stage further. The Law, as St. Paul first clearly explained, only takes you...

As someone has said “gods” is not really the plural of God; God has no plural.

We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only...

Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!

An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. [speaking...

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze....

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable...

The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.