“The more often [one] feels without acting, the less [one] will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less [he or she] will be able to feel.”
| The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 61.
“We find in our Prayer Book that Psalm 110 is one of those appointed for Christmas Day. We may at first be surprised by this. There is nothing in it about peace and goodwill, nothing remotely suggestive of the stable at Bethlehem. … The note is not ‘Peace and goodwill’ but ‘Beware. He’s coming’.”
“The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a foetus inside a woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.”
“There have been differences between civilization’s moralities. But these have never amounted to anything like a total difference…men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four, but they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.”
“The people never admire a man for doing something he likes; the very words ‘But he likes it’ imply the corollary ‘And therefore it has no merit’. Yet Kant stands the obvious truth, noted by Aristotle, that the more virtuous a man becomes the more he enjoys virtuous actions.”
“Think of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The moral law is not any one instinct or set of instincts; it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.”
“For God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been, more glorious than any unfallen race now is. . . . And this super-added glory will, with true vicariousness, exalt all creatures.”
| The Grand Miracle
“If we are to think about morality, we must think of three departments; relations between man and man; things inside each man; and relations between man and the power that made him.”
| Mere Christianity
“The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach trivial meaning to the word love…What we would here and now call our ‘happiness’ is not the end God chiefly has in view; but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.”