"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." --The Four Loves

"I find it difficult to keep from laughing when I find people worrying about future destruction of some kind or other. Didn't they know they were going to die anyway?  Apparently not." --God in the Dock

"We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or solving a cross-word puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us." --Letters to Malcolm

"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you." --Fern-seed and Elephants

"Our cause (Satan's demons) is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."--The Screwtape Letters

"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

"The gnat-like cloud of petty anxieties and decisions about the conduct of the next hour have interfered with my prayers more often than any passion or appetite whatever." --The Four Loves

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

"A right to happiness doesn't, for me, make much more sense than a right to be six feet tall, or to have a millionaire for your father, or to get good weather whenever you want a picnic." --God in the Dock

"The moment you wake up each morning, all you 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." --Mere Christianity

"It is the magician's bargain:   give up our souls, get power in return.  But...we shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls." --Mere Christianity

"God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror:  the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies.  Some  people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion."  --Mere Christianity

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end:  if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair." --Mere Christianity

"Goodness is, so to speak, itself:  badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled."--Mere Christianity

"What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could...be their own masters--invent some sort of happiness for themselves apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history...the long, terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."--Mere Christianity

"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...It means killing part of yourself." --Mere Christianity

"A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself.  In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble--because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time." --Mere Christianity

"(The Christian) does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us." --Mere Christianity

"One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up." --Mere Christianity

"Right actions done for the wrong reason do not help build the internal quality or character...We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules whereas He really wants people of a particular sort." --Mere Christianity

"As Dr. Johnson said, 'People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.' The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back...to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump." --Mere Christianity

"When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him...a thoroughly bad man things he is all right." --Mere Christianity

"After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again...this process trains us in habits of the soul." --Mere Christianity

"We learn...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.  The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection." --Mere Christianity

"Every one says that forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive...And then to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue:   it is that they think it hateful and contemptible." --Mere Christianity

" Loving my enemies does not mean thinking them nice...we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves--to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may...be cured...That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him:  wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not."  --Mere Christianity

"If you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, "How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or patronise me, or show off?" --Mere Christianity

"Pride is essentially competitive...Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only bout of having more of it than the next man." --Mere Christianity

"Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call "humble" nowadays:    he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody.  Probably al you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him..He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all. " --Mere Christianity

"Do not waste time bothering whether you "love " your neighbour; act as if you did....Do not sit and try to manufacture feelings."--Mere Christianity

"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."--Mere Christianity

"One must train the habit of Faith. The first step is to realise that moods change...We have to be continually reminded of what we believe....(Faith) must be fed....if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in  C Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument?  Do not most people simply drift away?"  --Mere Christianity

"No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good...Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is...All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, 'You must do this. I can't. It is the change from being confident about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for ourselves and leave it to God...(when) What we should have liked would be for God to count our good points and ignore our bad ones. " --Mere Christianity

" If what you call your 'faith' in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what He says, then it is not Faith at all--nor faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him." --Mere Christianity

"If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years." --Mere Christianity

"The best of (human beings) will make mistakes; all of them will die.  We must be thankful to the people who have helped us...but never, never pin your whole faith on any human being:  not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world." --Mere Christianity

"What a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is...Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth?  If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats:  it only prevents them from hiding." --Mere Christianity

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." --Mere Christianity

"If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad...Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though is makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of creatures that worked like machines would hardly be worth creating."--Mere Christianity

I think that many of us, when Christ has enabled us to overcome one or two s ins that were an obvious nuisance, are inclined to fall that we are now good enough. He has done all we wanted Him to do, and we should be obliged if He would now leave us alone."--Mere Christianity

"After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God...It is God who does everything. We, at most, allow it to be done to us." --Mere Christianity

"You can easily find some stupid and unsatisfactory Christian and say, 'So there's your boasted new man! Give me the old kind.' But...you will know in your heart that this is only evading the issue. What can you ever really know of other people's souls--of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggle? One soul in the whole creation you do know; and it is the only one whose fate is place in your hands." --Mere Christianity

"But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we would have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world--and might even be more difficult to save." --Mere Christianity

"If you  hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself.What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."--Herman Hesse

"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are that which we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit"
–Aristotle

"Life is difficult. God is merciful. Heaven is sure"
--Philip Yancey's father-in-law

"Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend."
--Dennis Covington

Be of good cheer, my brother, for I feel the bottom, and it is sound."
--Mr. Hopeful, in Pilgrim's Progress

"Truth is not in the middles and not at one extreme, but in both extremes."
--British pastor Charles Simeon