If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.
The devil loves ‘curing’ a small fault by giving you a great one.
We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.
When we are wholly His we will be more ourselves than ever.
We shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.
The full acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination.
The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.
In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way.
The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.
Your place in Heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it.
You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.
A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women.
When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only person in the world.
Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.
I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.
All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.
We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.
Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.