Best 40 quotes of Charles Williams on MyQuotes

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

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

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.

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

It’s said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire. That’s of the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it’s said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the everlasting dance.

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

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

"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?

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 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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

And that was when it really came home to me what I was about to do. I was going to rob a bank, committing the additional crime of arson in the process, and if I got caught I'd go to prison. Well, I thought, go on selling second-hand jalopies for another forty years and maybe somebody'll give you a testimonial and a forty-dollar watch.

But again He is equally present in sudden unexpected moments, and it is the neglect of these moments that is the most fruitful source of disbelief in Him.

First,” I said, “I’m sorry about the other day. I must have had the book open at the wrong place.” The violet eyes glanced up at me, and then became confused and looked away. “It’s all right,” she said. “Then you’re not mad at me?” She shook her head. “Not any more.” “That’s fine,” I said. “Now we can start even again. Next time I’ll read the instructions on the bottle.

Harry,” she said, her voice a little thick with the whisky. “You found the way, didn’t you?” What’s so wonderful about it? I thought. Dogs do.

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.

I generally give the title-page a fair chance," Roger said. "Once can't always judge books merely by the cover.

I got both hands on her throat and there was nothing inside me but the black madness of that desire to kill her, to close my hands until she turned purple and lay still and there’d be an end to her forever. Let them send me to the chair. Let ’em burn me. All they could do was kill me.

I rolled on my side and propped myself on my elbow. “I told you how that happened. I just got the instructions mixed up. This is Approach No. 2, known as the waiting game. You want me to explain how it works? You take these two citizens, A and B, we’ll call ‘em—“ She laughed, and picked up the charcoal stick again. “All right. I’ve been warned. But didn’t your instruction book warn you?” “About what?” I asked. “That your Approach No. 2, as you call it, won’t work after it’s been explained.” “Killjoy. Now I’ve got to buy a new manual.

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

Mornington suspected his Christianity of being the inevitable result of having moved for some time as a youth of eighteen in circles which were, in a rather detached and superior way, opposed to it; but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.

. Nature's so terribly good. Don't you think so, Mr. Stanhope?" Stanhope was standing by, silent, while Mrs. Parry communed with her soul and with one or two of her neighbours on the possibilities of dressing the Chorus. He turned his head and answered, "That Nature is terribly good? Yes, Miss Fox. You do mean 'terribly'?" "Why, certainly," Miss Fox said. "Terribly--dreadfully--very." "Yes," Stanhope said again. "Very. Only--you must forgive me; it comes from doing so much writing, but when I say 'terribly' I think I mean 'full of terror'. A dreadful goodness." "I don't see how goodness can be dreadful," Miss Fox said, with a shade of resentment in her voice. "If things are good they're not terrifying, are they?" "It was you who said 'terribly'," Stanhope reminded her with a smile, "I only agreed." "And if things are terrifying," Pauline put in, her eyes half closed and her head turned away as if she asked a casual question rather of the world than of him, "can they be good?" He looked down on her. "Yes, surely," he said, with more energy. "Are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?

Our crucifixes exhibit the pain, but they veil, perhaps necessarily, the obscenity: but the death of the God-Man was both.

, Stanhope delayed a moment behind Miss Fox to add: "The substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not the other way round." "The substantive?" Pauline asked blankly. "Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I'm keeping you. Good-bye, Periel," and he was gone.

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, they communicated and practiced, and waited. The then lasted, and there seemed to be no farther equivalent Now. Time became the individual and catholic problem. The Church had to become as universal and as durable — as time.

The forest itself has different names in different tongues — Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.

The hell with her; I wouldn’t go back. But wouldn’t I? What about later on? Keeping the thought of her out of that bleak hotbox of a room was going to be like trying to dam a river with a tennis racket.

There is no possible idea," Kenneth thought as he came onto the terrace, "to which the mind of man can't supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act.

There was no way to kiss her like a good boy. You could start out that way, but you always ended up on the other side of the tracks. If you hated her, it didn’t make any difference; it worked just the same.

What’s the matter with you, Madox? You got a grudge against the world?

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

You can take care of everything except chance. Chance can kill you.