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

To put it another way, pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can’t he rouse us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which...

this is a book about something

When we talk today about receptiveness to stories, we tend to contrast that attitude to one governed by reason – we talk about freeing ourselves from the shackles of the rational mind and that sort...

God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called...

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

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which...

My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and,...

The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists...

Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.

In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.

A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.

But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.No, said Tolkien, they are not….just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.We have come from God...

Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about.

…but even Peter Pan had to grow up one day.

Child” said the Voice, “I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.

In conversion, God interferes with out lives. We relinquish autonomy. If we find the gospel message to be true, we need to surrender to God and change our lives. For that reason – whether or...

But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well...

In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble–because the Christ-life is...

Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.

Feelings come and go, and when they come a good use can be made of them, but they cannot be our regular spiritual diet.

Of Course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is)… Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would...

Here I am going to say something which may come as a bit of a shock. God doesn’t necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to...

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling...

Self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation. If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you...

And (Tirian) called out “Aslan! Aslan! Aslan! Come and help us now.”But the darkness and the cold and the quietness went on just the same.”Let me be killed,” cried the King. “I ask nothing for...