The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.
Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam – he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.
People talk as if grief were just a feeling – as if it weren’t the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.
An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.
There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he “has read” them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?
Time is the very lens through which ye see – small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope – something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality.
If you find that the reader of popular romances – however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances – goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.
Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.
You must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.
I have always at least, ever since I can remember had a kind of longing for death.
Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity, which, in spite of its divisions, it has never lost. I trembled on recognizing the same unmistakable aroma coming from the writings of Dante and Bunyan, Thomas Aquinas and William Law.
A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth.
The Opposite of Love is not hate, but power.
If crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime and compulsorily cured.
Is there a difference between a man who thinks that honesty is the best policy, and an honest man?
No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.
It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose him as an alternative to hell.
Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly.