"All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away" (120).
"To hate is to reject, to set one's face against, to make no concession to, the Beloved when the Beloved utters, however sweetly and however pitiably, the suggestions of the Devil" (123).
The Great Divorce:
"My teachers gave a curious smile. 'Look' he said, and with the word he went down on his hands and knees. I did the same (how it hurt my knees!) and presently saw that he had plucked a blade of grass. Using its thin end as a pointer, he made me see, after I had looked very closely, a crack in the soil so small that I could not have identified it without aid...
Do you mean then that Hell -- all that infinite empty town -- is down in some little crack like this?" 'Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World...
"It seems big enough when you're in it Sir!
'And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the seale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good" (360).
The Problem of Pain
"The door into life generally opens behind us' and 'the only wisdom' for one 'haunted with the scent of unseen roses, is work'" (429).
Reflections on the Psalms
"[Jesus] will always prove the most elusive of teachers. Systems cannot keep up with that darting illumination. No net less wide than a man's whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish" (119).
