You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly; while you are making them you cannot see them. Good people know about both bad and evil; bad people do not know about either.
Progress means movement in a desired direction, and we do not all desire the same things for our species.
The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting?
As a Christian I take it for granted that human history will some day end; and I am offering Omniscience no advice as to the best date for that consummation.
Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only “liked”: it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.
The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker’s desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.
Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.
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.