Top 27 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Williams

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.

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

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.

Hell is indefinite.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Of Adam and Eve: They had what they wanted. That they did not like it when they got it does not alter the fact that they certainly got it.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.