Quotes by Charles Williams

“Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God.”

“The Church expected the Second Coming of Christ immediately. The converts had known a first coming. And then? And then! That was the trouble the then. He had come, and they adored and believed, th...”

“Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice. The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor...”

“We still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. C.S. Lewis”

“The author observes of the Inklings, "they make a perfect compass rose of faith: talking the Catholic, Lewis the "mere Christian," Williams the Anglican, Barfield the esotericist.”

“Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness.”

“Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.”

“Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, "freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity from possessiveness.”

“Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.”

“Obedience appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace.”

“Fidelity in marriage requires self-will and self-denial.”

“Shame and suffering, as St. Bernard says, are the two ladder-uprights which are set up to heaven, and between those two uprights are the rungs of all virtues fixed, by which one climbs to the joy o...”

“A Christian's duty, Lewis believed, is not simply to tolerate "X" but to make life with "X" an occasion to work on one's own character flaws.”

“It's not easy being a missionary, even with the key to the cosmos in your hand.”

“The teacher-student relationship evaporated, replaced by a rich and lively exchange of equals.”

“He would henceforth worship and defend the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy.”

“Lewis spoke for almost every member when he said, "There is no sound I like better than adult male laughter.”

“A philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all.”

“She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and her Church, pou...”

“This is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with the expected 20th-century psychological explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritua...”