If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination.
We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.
When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over.
A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating.
You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are “on” concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note.
You’ve no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.
The people who keep asking if they can’t lead a decent life without Christ, don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that ‘a decent life’ is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for.
No time for better words, no time to unsay anything. -Til We Have Faces.
In the name of the Fathers, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes-I mean Amen.
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.
It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.
Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done.
Everything is as good or bad as our opinion makes it.
The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.
I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.
In your world, I have another name. You should know me by it.
But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.
If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.