Charles Williams quotes:

Every contrition for sin is apt to encourage a not quite charitable wish that other people should exhibit a similar contrition.

The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God.

Job plunges into a series of demands on and accusations of God which may be and indeed are epigrams of high intelligence, but are not noticeably patient.

To forgive and to be forgiven are the two points of holy magnificence and holy modesty; round these two centres the whole doctrine of largesse revolves.

The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God

The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church.

You can have money piled to the ceiling but the size of your funeral is still going to depend on the weather.

You will all know that in the Middle Ages there were supposed to be various classes of angels. these hierarchized celsitudes are but the last traces in a less philosophical age of the ideas which Plato taught his disciples existed in the spiritual world.

The strong hands of God twisted the crown of thorns into a crown of glory; and in such hands we are safe.

Hell is indefinite.

The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.

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, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius." "Quite," Anthony answered.

The beginning of Christendom, is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the Ascent of the Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the Descent of the Paraclete. That measurement, the measurement of eternity in operation, of the bright cloud and the rushing wind, is, in effect, theology.

The most he would do was to promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against it. It is about all that, looking back on the history of the Church, one can feel that they have not done.

An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.

Love was even more mathematical than poetry. It was the pure mathematics of the spirit.

Why was this bloody world created?""As a sewer for the stars," a voice in front of him saidAlternatively to know God and to glorify Him forever."" [...] The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative."

It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else.

Many promising reconciliations have broken down because while both parties come prepared to forgive, neither party come prepared to be forgiven.

Her mouth was soft and moist, and she came to me like a dachshund jumping into your lap.

I think in order to move forward into the future, you need to know where you've been

It is as pleasant as it is unusual to see thoroughly good people getting their deserts.

Play and pray; but on the whole do not pray when you are playing and do not play when you are praying.

How can one bargain for anything that is worth while? And what else is worth bargaining for?

Unless devotion is given to the thing which must prove false in the end, the thing that is true in the end cannot enter.

It is easier often to forgive than to be forgiven; yet it is fatal to be willing to be forgiven by God and to be reluctant to be forgiven by men

"Nought usually comes at the beginning," Ralph said. "Not necessarily," said Sibyl. "It might come anywhere. Nought isn't a number at all. It's the opposite of number." Nancy looked up from the cards. "Got you, aunt," she said. "What about ten? Nought's a number there - it's part of ten." "Well, if you say that any mathematical arrangement of one and nought really makes ten - " Sibyl smiled. "Can it possibly be more than a way of representing ten?"