A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.
Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
Die before you die, there is no chance after.
What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.
We’re free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you’re running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn’t your horse any longer. One might just as well say you’re her human.