Quotes from Charles Williams

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

Hell is indefinite.

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

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

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.

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

It'll do you all the good in the world, Giles, to be a little uncertain of yourself".

The altar must be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another place.

The child lies unborn in the queen's womb; unformed in his brain is the web of all our doom, as unformed in the minds of all the great lords lies the image of the split Table and of surreptitious swords.

There are tales that can give you yourself completely and the world could never treat you so badly then that you wouldn't neglect it. One can get everything by listening or looking in the right way: there are all sorts of turns.

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.

Rejection was to be rejection but not denial, as reception was to be reception but not subservience. Both methods, the Affirmative Way and the Negative Way, were to co-exist; one might almost say, to co-inhere, since each was to be the key of the other: in intellect as in emotion, in morals as in doctrine.

And jewels and words are no less and no more necessary than cotton and silence.

She sat the sister of Arthur, the wife of Lot four sons got by him, and one not.

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.