-
It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power -- it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.
-
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'.
-
Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy.
-
Christ did not die for man because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because he is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely.
-
The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.
-
Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. ... 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 man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.
-
The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths--but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.
-
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ.
-
Good and evil increase at compound interest. That's why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance.
-
This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
-
I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was "Feed my sheep", not "Try experiments on my rats", or even "Teach my performing dogs new tricks".
-
The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.
-
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
-
God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
-
Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.
-
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.
-
All these toys were never intended to possess my heart. My true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ.
-
And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.
-
Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.
-
We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.
-
We are finite and God will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.
-
But why,... if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own? Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality.
-
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
-
If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.