The Weight of Glory:-
*******************
"The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys..."
"The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation."
"You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness."
"Perfect humility dispenses with modesty."
"If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself."
"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."
*******************
"The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys..."
"The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation."
"You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness."
"Perfect humility dispenses with modesty."
"If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself."
"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."
"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."
"No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'"
"We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship."
"To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek Calends."
"100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased."
"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."
The Problem of Pain:-
********************
"If the universe is so bad...how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?"
"Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."
"Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal."
"When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy."
"When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary."
"If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally."
"Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment."
"Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one..."
"The 'frankness' of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness."
"We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin."
"It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork."
"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
"[Pain] removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul."
"We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it."
"It matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth."
"Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask."
"[God] is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him."
"If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?"
"Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless."
"Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere "opiate of the people" have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor."
"Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time."
"Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire."
"Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you."
"God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love."
"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself."
"A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun."
"For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being."
"What is outside the system of self-giving is no earth, nor nature, nor 'ordinary life', but simply and solely Hell. Yet even Hell derives from this law such reality as it has."
"That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality..."
"Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience."
"All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt."
"[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation."
"The road to the promised land runs past Sinai."
"From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it."
"At this very moment you and I are either committing [selfishness], or about to commit it, or repenting it."
"The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success."
"Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger."
"This act of self-will on the part of the creature, which constitutes an utter falseness to its true creaturely position, is the only sin that can be conceived as the Fall."
"God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense."
"The gravitation away from God, 'the journey homeward to habitual self', must, we think, be a product of the Fall."
"[One] can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity."
"In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are."
"Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it."
The Case for Christianity:-
*************************
"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."
"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."
"Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other."
"Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed."
"Badness is only spoiled goodness."
"God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form...The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man."
"Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it."
"It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men."
"I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation."
Reflections on the Psalms:-
*************************
"The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about."
"Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes."
A Preface to Paradise Lost:=
***************************
"The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development--"
"Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose."
"Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all."
"Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result."
"Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?"
"Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior."
"Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules."
"In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Lucifer] could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige."
"It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations."
"People blush at praise--not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs."
The Allegory of Love:-
*********************
"To fight in another man's armour is something more than to be influenced by his style of fighting."
The Abolition of Man:-
********************
"The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it."
"It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous."
"Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism."
"As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element.'"
"A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional...values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process."
"The preservation of society, and of the species itself, are ends that do not hang on the precarious thread of Reason: they are given by Instinct."
"If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them."
"An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy."
"Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position."
"If we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity..."
"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."
"Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man."
"No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power."
"If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all."
From a letter "To A Lady":-
***************************
"Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done..."
"...art can teach without at all ceasing to be art."
"You have gone into the Temple...and found Him, as always, there."
Reflections on the Psalms:-
***************************
"No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights."
"Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst."
"Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible."
"The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance."
Surprised by Joy:-
*****************
"An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath."
"The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting."
"The surest way of spoiling a pleasure [is] to start examining your satisfaction."
"A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere--'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous."
"Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side."
"You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to 'know of the doctrine'."
"The true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end."
"The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it."
"The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost."
Letters to Malcolm:-
*******************
"To be discontinuous from God as I am discontinuous from you would be annihilation."
"Joy is the serious business of Heaven."
"Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us..."
"We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument...Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege."
"Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all."
"We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God."
"Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality."
"Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death."
"Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?"
Prince Caspian:-
***************
"'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.'"
The World's Last Night:-
**********************
"Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it."
Till We Have Faces:-
*******************
"Nothing is yet in its true form."
Encounter with Light:-
*********************
"If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?"
The Pilgrim's Regress:-
**********************
"It now seemed that...the deepest thirst within him was not adapted to the deepest nature of the world."
Transposition and Other addresses:-
**********************************
"Though I do not believe that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will."
"We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness..."
Till We Have Faces:-
*******************
"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."
The Last Battle:-
****************
"There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes."
From an unknown letter:-
**********************
"All joy...emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings."
The Silver Chair:-
*****************
"'You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,'" said the Lion."
Perelandra:-
***********
"Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices."
Mere Christianity:-
*****************
"If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying."
"Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self..."
"The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe."
"[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that."
"The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ."
"Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is..."
"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."
On Three Ways of Writing for Children:-
**************************************
"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves."
"The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle."
The Allegory of Love:-
**********************
"Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also."
Christian Reflections:-
**********************
"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 very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike...Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish."
"Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe."
"A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid..."
"The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time."
"History is a story written by the finger of God."
"Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?"
"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..."
Mere Christianity:-
******************
"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..."
"When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all."
"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."
"There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails...If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft."
"Now that I am a Christian I do not have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable."
"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."
'Notes on the Way', Time and Tide:-
**********************************
"If we retain only what can be justified by standards of prudence and convenience at he bar of enlightened common sense, then we exchange revelation for that old
wraith Natural Religion."
A Christian Reply to Professor Price:-
************************************
"If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes...it cuts its own throat."
"The essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends..."
English Literature in the 16th Century:-
***************************************
"Morality or duty...never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others."
The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment:-
**************************************
"It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies."
The Great Divorce:-
******************
"Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already."
"'Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death.'"
"This moment contains all moments."
The Silver Chair:-
*****************
"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."
"'Don't you mind him,' said Puddleglum. 'There are no accidents. Our guide is Aslan.'"
Myth Became Fact, World Dominion:-
*********************************
"Human intellect is incurably abstract."
"The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think."
"You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter."
Letters:-
********
"So many things--nay every real thing--is good if only it will be humble and ordinate."
"Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated."
"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."
An Experiment in Criticism:-
***************************
"There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious."
"In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person's place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity."
Transposition and Other Addresses:-
**********************************
"If there is equality it is in His love, not in us."
"Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live."
"He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself..."
'Notes on the Way' Time and Tide:-
*********************************
"Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many..."
"Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves."
The Screwtape Letters:-
**********************
"The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior."
'Delinquents in the Snow' Time and Tide:-
*****************************************
"They do not get their qualities from a class: they belong to that class because they have those qualities."
'Hedonics' Time and Tide:-
*************************
"We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism--the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good."
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature:-
***********************************************
"Many things--such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly--are done worst when we try hardest to do them."
"Conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it."
A Grief Observed:-
******************
"Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions."
Encounter With Light:-
*********************
"The notion that everyone would like Christianity to be true, and therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense."
Miracles:-
*********
"Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion."
"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'."
"Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control."
They Asked for a Paper:-
***********************
"Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly."
Book Review, Review of English Studies:-
***************************************
"For whatever else the religious life may be, it is the fountain of self-knowledge and disillusion, the safest form of psychoanalysis."
The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment:-
**************************************
"Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful."
Perelandra:-
**********
"Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot form their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity."
"'How can I step out of [God's] will save into something that cannot be wished?'"
"The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence."
The Last Battle:-
****************
"'Yes,' said Queen Lucy. 'In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.'"
"And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies' plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger."
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:-
************************************
"'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.'"
"'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.'"
The Horse and His Boy:-
*********************
"'Then instantly the pale brightness of the mist and the fiery brightness of the Lion rolled themselves together into a swirling glory and gathered themselves up and disappeared.'"
The World's Last Night:-
***********************
"The idea which...shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience."
"To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it."
"'Something of God...flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.'"
Out of the Silent Planet:-
*************************
"'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.'"
"These things are not strange, Small One, though they are beyond our senses."
A Preface to Paradise Lost:-
**************************
"A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers--including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower."
"To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."
That Hideous Strength:-
*********************
"...of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men."
"Hatred obscures all distinctions."
The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treader':-
**********************************
"Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself."
Foreword to Joy Davidman's Smoke on the Mountain:-
**************************************************
"Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat."
Answers to Questions on Christianity:-
************************************
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."