Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary.

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.

You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.

And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.

All the time the joke is that the word "mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either [Satan] or God will say "mine" of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.

I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him.