232 Quotes by C. S. Lewis

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. (Quote Meaning)

What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it. (Meaning)

Courage, dear heart. (Quote Meaning)

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. (Meaning)

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts. (Quote Meaning)

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. (Meaning)

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement. (Quote Meaning)

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. (Meaning)

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You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. (Quote Meaning)

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. (Meaning)

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. (Quote Meaning)

God is love. (Meaning)

Joy is the serious business of Heaven. (Quote Meaning)

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities. (Meaning)

We are what we believe we are. (Quote Meaning)

You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.

Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.

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Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. (Meaning)

Don't shine so that others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see HIM.

The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.

If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.

Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks

There are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid and disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine because that is how God loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but He delights to give.

When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. (Meaning)

I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much are what make us perfect.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

He (the devil) always sends errors into the world in pairs--pairs of opposites...He relies on your extra dislike of one to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching. (Meaning)

You must make your choice: either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

To forgive the incessant provocations of daily life - to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son - how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night, “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what he says.

Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny. (Quote Meaning)

Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. It doesn't change God - it changes me.

Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

God doesn't want something from us. He simply wants us.

Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind. (Meaning)

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. (Quote Meaning)

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'

I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more. (Meaning)

We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.

The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become - because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. . .It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

On the back of Satan's neck is a nail scarred footprint. (Meaning)

For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.

When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.

Don't judge a man by where he is, because you don't know how far he has come.

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us toward is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.

The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.

The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.

God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.

We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms.

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

You must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

God loves us NOT because we're lovable, because He is love. Not because He needs to receive, because He delights to give.

Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here's the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it.

No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible Gods and Goddesses. To remember that the dullest, and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.

Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.

If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it.

The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.

We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.

God, in the end, gives people what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair?

Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher. He'd be either a lunatic on a level with a man who says he's a poached egg or else he'd be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.

When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.

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.

We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.

Of course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking with cheerful seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.

Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.

Homemaking is surely in reality the most important work in the world.

God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.

It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.

In such a fearful world, we need a fearless church

You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

God wants a child's heart and a grownup's head.

The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.

A sign of a culture that has lost its faith - Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Nothing is really ours until we share it. (Meaning)

True friends don’t spend time gazing into each other’s eyes. They may show great tenderness towards each other but they face in the same direction - toward common projects, goals - above all, towards a common Lord.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

Forgiveness does not mean excusing. (Meaning)

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.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.

The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed.

In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.

Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it.

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.

If you never take risks, you'll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'

We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.

There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.

If we only have the will to walk, then God is pleased with our stumbles.

Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.

Love as distinct from "being in love" is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.

A Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.

Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.

When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others—not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.

Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.

Everything that is not eternal is worthless in eternity. (Meaning)

If nothing in this world satisfies me, perhaps it is because I was made for another world.

The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.

He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.

Have fun, even if it’s not the same kind of fun everyone else is having.

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.

Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . ."

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

I'm not sure God wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering.

The holier a man becomes, the more he mourns over the unholiness which remains in him.

Christ, who said to the disciples, 'You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.'

The Opposite of Love is not hate, but power

We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.

Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest upon reciprocity. (Meaning)

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.

Love is more than an emotion, it is a decision. (Meaning)

Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will (Meaning)

Man does not have a soul. He is a soul. He has a body.

Enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.

Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.

The more pride we have, the more other people’s pride irritates us

Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to 'cure' it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers.

The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or — if they think there is not — at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair.

Provocation doesn't make me ill-tempered: it only shows me how ill-tempered I am.

It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It's not the sort of comfort they supply there.

You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.

Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained. (Quote Meaning)

Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good - above all, that we are better than someone else - I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil.

There have been men before who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself, as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

If one could run without getting tired I don't think one would often want to do anything else.

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment 'as to the Lord.' It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

A clever arrangement of bad eggs will never make a good omelet.

You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage but He is building a palace. He intends to come & live in it Himself

Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others.

A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.

No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.

Christ says, 'Give me all. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You.'

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

To walk out of his will is to walk into nowhere. (Meaning)

One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.

The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week.

It is not your business to succeed, but to do right. When you have done so the rest lies with god.

Jesus produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.

In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.

Obedience is the road to freedom.

Friendship is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.

Seek Unity and you will find neither Unity nor Truth.Seek the light of truth, and you will find Unity and Truth.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker's, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.

Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.

What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.

Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want

That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.

When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only person in the world.

Nobody who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any business to talk about 'misery.'

God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us.

You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God. (Meaning)

The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said

The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.

Through pride the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every vice, it's the complete anti-God state of mind.

It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good.

The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it.

Suspicion often creates what it suspects. (Meaning)

The stamp of the Saint is that he can waive his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus.

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic -- to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world

A man whose life has been transformed by Christ cannot help but have his worldview show through.

He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses. This makes sense only if He really was God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin.

You can't go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.

Friends are like coals in a fire - together, they glow; apart, they grow cold.

Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.

Of Course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is)... Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.

A little lie is like a little pregnancy it doesn't take long before everyone knows.

This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'.

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature...

It takes courage to live through suffering; and it takes honesty to observe it.

You must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.

Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.

God is the food our spirits were designed to feed on.

Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.

The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him.

when pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.

Extraordinary things only happen to extraordinary people. Maybe it's a sign that you've got an extraordinary destiny--something greater than you could've imagined.

We were made not primarily that we may love God, but that God may love us.

Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted---i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk---don't keep on looking at it.

I pray because I can't help myself. (Meaning)

Most people don't need to be taught, they need only to be reminded

A man can't be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam.

Every contact you make with everyone you meet will help them or hinder them on their journey to heaven.

One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself.

Miracles are for beginners.