Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life Quotes

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A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of ...

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

But, of course, what mattered most of all was my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word INTERFERENCE. But Christianity placed at the centre what then...

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

The quality common to the three experiences... is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasu...

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not 'a religion', nor 'a philosophy.' It is the summing up and actuality of them all.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

…the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects, we destroy his standards, per...

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by 'maistry'.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would he also be "reasonable" [...]

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

We are taught in the Prayer Book to "give thanks to God for His great glory", as if we owed Him more thanks for being what He necessarily is than for any particular benefit He confers upon us… so indeed we do and to know God is to know this.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

Tea should be taken in solitude.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

And there lies the deadly error. Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else-whether a distance mountain, or the past, or the golds of Asgard-does the "thrill" arise. It is a by-product. Its very existence presupposes that y...

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom only the Greek word lives...

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life