Quote

"Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost


"Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?"
--A Preface to Paradise Lost


"Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost


"The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it."
--The Abolition of Man


"It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous."
--The Abolition of Man


"A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional...values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process."
--The Abolition of Man


"An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy."
--The Abolition of Man


"If we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity..."
--The Abolition of Man


"What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument."
--The Abolition of Man


"Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man."
--The Abolition of Man


"No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power."
--The Abolition of Man



"Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done..."
--from a letter "To Mrs. L." (50)


"Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."
--The Problem of Pain


"Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal."
--The Problem of Pain


"Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment."
--The Problem of Pain


"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
--The Problem of Pain


"[Pain] removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul."
--The Problem of Pain


"It matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth."
--The Problem of Pain


"Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless."
--The Problem of Pain



"'You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,' said Aslan. 'And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.'"
--Prince Caspian


"Nothing is yet in its true form."
--Till We Have Faces


"If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?"
--Encounter with Light


"'You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,'" said the Lion."
--The Silver Chair


"A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere--'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous."
--Surprised by Joy



"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself."
--The Problem of Pain



"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves."
--On Three Ways of Writing for Children



"The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle."
--On Three Ways of Writing for Children (100)


"Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also."
--The Allegory of Love



"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..."
--Mere Christianity


"If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes...it cuts its own throat."
--A Christian Reply to Professor Price


"Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe."
--Christian Reflections


"[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation."
--The Problem of Pain


"Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst."
--Reflections on the Psalms


"It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies."
--The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment


"Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already."
--The Great Divorce


"Human intellect is incurably abstract."
--Myth Became Fact, World Dominion