To every soul, God will look like its first love because He IS its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it – made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.
When golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift?
I want God, not my idea of God.
Delight is incomplete until it is expressed.
Forgiveness does not mean excusing.
Thirst was made for water. Inquiry for truth.
There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.
Man is to be understood only in his relationship to God.
Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare’s plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters...
If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must think of God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.
Our problem with desire is that we want too little.
We treat our dogs as if they were “almost human”: that is why they really become “almost human” in the end.
The prayer preceding all prayers is ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’
A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.
In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s, we do not accept them easily enough.
Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair.
You must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give.
Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.
I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.
Jesus produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.