SundayMar 01, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
The chief end of man, as I see it, is to find security, have liberty to express his abilities, enjoy the love of family and friends, and to secure recognition of his talents, to worship God in his own way, and to participate in a government that will protect him in his exercise of these liberties, and by education and training in the development of the arts and sciences, and the techniques of their application, help him to find his proper place in the scheme of things.
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
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.
Imagine yourself living in a house. God comes to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on. You knew that those jobs needed doing and so you were not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought ofthrowing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up the towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage; but he is building a palace.
If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty, therefore there is an invisible cat in it.
Sometimes, though not often [in meetings of the Inklings], it would happen that no one had anything to read to us. On these occasions the fun would be riotous, with Jack at the top of his form and enjoying every minute 'no sound delights me more', he once said, 'than male laughter'. At the Inklings his talk was an outpouring of wit, nonsense, whimsy, dialectical swordplay, and pungent judgement such as I have rarely heard equalled no mere show put on for the occasion, either, since it was often quite as brilliant when he and I were alone together.... In his Preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, Jack gave a lively and moving account of what this circle meant to him.
As all his friends will bear witness, he was a man with an outstanding gift for pastime with good company, for laughter and the love of friends a gift which found full scope in any number of holidays and walking tours, the joyous character of his response to these being well conveyed in his letters. He had, indeed, a remarkable talent for friendship, particularly for friendship of an uproarious kind, and argumentative but never quarrelsome.
I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate to the left or right, the readers will most certainly go into it.
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to 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 casketsafe, dark, motionless, airlessit will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for tomorrow, or for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those claims only of tomorrow which have to be repeated today are the joy of today: the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere until God has made it.
Everyone there (heaven) is filled 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 a t the source from which it comes.
This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a great rumor going around the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.
The vice I am talking about is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea-bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
What you see and hear depends a great deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather [for the devil].
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the 'wisdom' of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipli
You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Brontë, of anyone else I have read.
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
The faint, far-off results of those energies which God's creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountainhead of that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will 'flow over' into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialized and depraved appetites, we cannot imagine this [torrent of pleasure], and I warn everyone most seriously not to try. But it must be mentioned, to drive out thoughts even more misleading thoughts that what is saved is a mere ghost, or that the risen body lives in numb insensibility. The body is made for the Lord, and these dismal fancies are wide of the mark.
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest....
Man must endure his going hence.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art ... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: 'What! You, too? I thought I was the only one.'
The more often a man feels without acting, the less he'll be able to act. And in the long run, the less he'll be able to feel.
Regarding the debate about faith and works: Its like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most important.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.
'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'.
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
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.
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
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