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A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.All that we call human history-money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
…art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.
As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
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…
Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many…
Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion.
Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.
Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers "Please will you do the job for me."
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
Don't you mind him,' said Puddleglum. 'There are no accidents. Our guide is Aslan.
Don’t you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they can’t help?
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!"
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
Hatred obscures all distinctions.
History is a story written by the finger of God.
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it.
Human intellect is incurably abstract.
Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
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.
… I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh Adam's sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself.
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
If there is equality it is in His love, not in us.
If we could know which of us, darling, would be the first to go, who would be first to breast the swelling tide and step alone upon the other side - if we could know!
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 capitalists for the same reasons.
If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a "wandering to find home," why should we not look forward to the arrival?
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.
It is hard to have patience with people who say "There is no death" or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men.
It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
It was when I was happiest that I longed most…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.
Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
"Just a hurried line…to tell a story which puts the contrast between *our* feast of the Nativity and all this ghastly Xmas racket at it's lowest. My brother heard a woman on a 'bus say, as the 'bus passed a church with a Crib outside it, Oh Lor'! They bring religion into everything. Look- they're dragging it even into Christmas now!
Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters…
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. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
Many things-such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly—are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful.
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
Morality or duty…never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.
No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'.
Nothing is yet in its true form.
Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death.
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated.
Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.
Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death.
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it.
Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.
Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other.
Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.
Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done…
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.
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith [but] they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is…
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest…
The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.
The difference [God's] timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite.
The essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends…
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary colour in the spectrum…
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys…
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self-all your wishes and precautions-to Christ.
The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation.
There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
This moment contains all moments.
This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.
Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality.
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek Calends.
Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe.
Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self…
We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness…
We are what we believe we are.
We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge—the last thing we know before things become too swift for us.
We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism—the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good.
We laugh at honor, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God.
We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.
When humans should have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.
When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.
When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.
When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude…that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing.
Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.
Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?
Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?
Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.
Yes,' said Queen Lucy. 'In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.
You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,' said Aslan. 'And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.
You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
You play the hand you're dealt. I think the game's worthwhile.You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,'" said the Lion.
