Tea should be taken in solitude.
When I began writing stories in exercise books I tried to put off all the things I really wanted to write about till at least the second page – I thought it would be like a grown-up book if it became interesting at once.
One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome lit...
Schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, fix men's affections on the future ─ on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past, and love to the pr...
The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which w...
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.
The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.
I do not expect old heads on young shoulders.
To believe with certainty, somebody said, one has to begin by doubting.
Both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, all of one's life will eventually be known to have been one or the other.
C.S. Lewis in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. 'Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that th...
My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrativ...
One way or another the thing had to die. Perpetual springtime is not allowed. You were not cutting the wood of life according to the grain.
What we did see was that jealousy is fear: it can corrode even if quite baseless.
Whatever one of us asked the other to do - it was assumed the asker would weigh all the consequences - the other would do. Thus one might wake the other in the night and ask for a cup of water; and the other would peacefully (and sleepily) fetch it. ...
For agnosticism is, in a sense, what I am preaching. I do not wish to reduce the sceptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else.
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 master demon Screwtape identifies elitist humanity's tendency toward "an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men.
But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; the...
Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at al...
The vocabulary of endearment, complaint, and abuse, provides, I think, almost the only specimens of words that are purely emotional, words from which all imaginative or conceptual content has vanished, so that they have no function at all but to expr...
