Revolutions often perpetuate the old evil under a new name.
When two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also—I must put it crudely—good people; controlled, loyal, fair-minded, mutually adaptable people.
Being what we are, rational but also animate, amphibians who start from the world of sense and proceed through myth and metaphor to the world of spirit. I do not see how we could have come to know the greatness of God without that hint that furnished...
How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask-half our great theological and metaphysical problems-are like that.
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.
The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.
The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.
You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with the vast continent we really belong to.
You invaded Narnia. You have no more right leading than Miraz does. Peter Pevensie: You, him, your father! Narnia's better off without the lot of you!
We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: "I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely.
The two things that came out clearly were the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should incipient allegories to the reader. [C.S. Lewis wr...
The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.
The experience of a miracle means we must recognize that the data offered by our senses recur in regular pattern.
For the critics who think Chesterton frivolous or 'paradoxical' I have to work hard to feel even pity; sympathy is out of the question.
I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comf...
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” C.S. Lewis
In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall n...
Experience by itself proves nothing. If a man doubts whether he is sleeping or waking, no experiment can solve his doubt, since every experiment may itself be part of the dream. Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconcept...
All science is based on observation: all our observations are taken DURING Humpty Dumpty's fall, because we were born after he lost his seat on the wall and shall be extinct long before he reaches the ground.
If any man is tempted to think – as one might be tempted to who read only contemporaries – that "Christianity" is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt by stepping out of his own century, that this...
