“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.”
–Myth Became Fact, World Dominion
“The surest way of spoiling a pleasure [is] to start examining your satisfaction.”
–Surprised by Joy
“If there is equality it is in His love, not in us.”
–Transposition and Other Addresses
“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.”
–‘Notes on the Way’ Time and Tide
“Many things–such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly–are done worst when we try hardest to do them.”
–Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
“Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions.”
–A Grief Observed
“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.”
–Mere Christianity
“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…”
–‘The Seeing Eye’, Christian Reflections (150)
“For whatever else the religious life may be, it is the fountain of self-knowledge and disillusion, the safest form of psychoanalysis.”
–Book Review, Review of English Studies
“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.”
–Letters (1 August 1949)
“Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death.”
–Letters (c. September 1940)
“Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side.”
–Surprised by Joy
“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 Last Battle
“Hatred obscures all distinctions.”
–‘On Science Fiction’, Of Other Worlds
“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.”
–The Problem of Pain (200)
“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
–Answers to Questions on Christianity