Quotes from Charles Williams

How can you insult God?" the Archdeacon asked. "About as much as you can pull his nose. . . . for him to have done it in order to avenge God would have been silly.

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.

Would you rather be more abominable than you sound or sound more abominable than you are? The answer is I would rather be neither but I am both.

But no verse, not Stanhope's, not Shakespeare's, not Dante's could rival the original, and this was the original, and the verse was but the best translation of a certain manner of its life. The glory of poetry could not outshine the clear glory of the certain fact, and not any poetry could hold as many meanings as the fact.

don't believe in these things. There's London and us and the things we know.

All beauty returns. Wait a little.

but he did not change his purpose, nor did the universe invite him to change. It accepted the choice; no more preventing him than it prevents a child playing with fire or a fool destroying his love. It has not our kindness or our decency; if it is good, its goodness is of another kind than ours.

He would probably think that the Good was the same thing as God — like a less educated monk of the Dark Ages. Personification

Dearest, I don't like you a bit," Anthony interrupted again. "I think you're a very detestable, selfish pig and prig. But I'm often wildly in love with you, and so I see you're not. But I'm sure your only chance of salvation is to marry me.

saying that she had no more notion of Plato than of Charlemagne, and that herreal subject wasDamaristic Tradition at the Court of

Damaris; upon which he swore he would write a long highbrow article and publish it — Damaris being, for that purpose, a forgotten queen of Trebizond overthrown by the Saracen invasion.

But Lord Arglay, at once in contact and detached, at once faithless and believing, beheld all these things in the light of that fastidious and ironical goodwill which, outside mystical experience, is the finest and noblest capacity man has developed in and against the universe.

If the redeemed sing, presumably someone must write the songs.

There is, it seems, a law in things that if a man is compelled to choose between two good actions, mutually exclusive, the one which he chooses to neglect will in course of time avenge itself on him. Rightly considered, this is a comfortable if chastening thought, for it implies that the nature of good is such that it can never, not even for some other mode of itself, be neglected. If ever it is, for whatever admirable reasons, set on one side it will certainly return.

I hope I'm always fair," said Mr. Coningsby, meaning that he couldn't imagine Eternal Justice disagreeing with him

No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly.

superstitious slavery" into "credulous piety" and "emotional

opportunism" into "fervent zeal.

She altered "priestly oppression" into "official influence" almost automatically, however, recalling that Anthony had told

I hope you still think that ideas are more dangerous than material things," Quentinsaid. "That was what you were arguing at lunch.

the shock which he undoubtedly had felt was the result of not expecting people to murder other people. "Whereas they naturally do," he said to himself. "The normal thing with an unpleasant intrusion is to try and exclude it – human or not. So silly not to be prepared for these things. Some people, as De Quincey said, have a natural aptitude for being murdered. To kill or to be killed as a perfectly reasonable thing . . .

the god who had given his name to the building which was the home of the greatest bishop in the world, the centre of the Roman Church, the shrine (it was said) of infallible authority, was Vaticanus, and the office of Vaticanus was to preside over the new-born child's first cry. That was all; that was all that the Vatican itself could do, and all that the Vatican held.

Everything lovely in you for a perpetual companion, so that you'd never be frightened or disappointed or ashamed any more. 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.

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