Length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery.
A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can’t put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover.
The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be “like real life” in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may “conquer” them.
The Old Testament contains fabulous elements. The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical. As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out.
If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.
I mean, the more a man was in the Devil’s power, the less he would be aware of it, on the principle that a man is still fairly sober as long as he knows he’s drunk.
There is only one way fit for a man – Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.
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.