Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.
The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.
Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back – to be sucked back – into it?
As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.
Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as wel say that birth doesn’t matter.
Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes – like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night – little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape wil be quite hidden in the end.
The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.
Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.
Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my conversion. Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?
I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.
Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.
It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal’s voice for a god’s. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god’s voice takes it for a man’s.
If they won’t write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.
That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal sufferring, “No future bliss can make up for it” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.
I haven’t any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.
And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.
This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!
And there, right in the middle of it, I find ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.’ There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.
There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.