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.
Being nice doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you feel good because you know you are gracious enough to forgive and smart enough to realize how distasteful some people can be.
Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.
All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
They were really getting quite fond of their strange pet and hoped that Aslan would allow them to keep it. The cleverer ones were quite sure by now that at least some of the noises which came out of his mouth had a meaning. They christened him Brandy because he made that noise so often.
Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours.
The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.
Every joy is beyond all others.