Top 55 Charles Williams Quotes
#1. It'll do you all the good in the world, Giles, to be a little uncertain of yourself".
Charles Williams
#2. I generally give the title-page a fair chance," Roger said. "Once can't always judge books merely by the cover.
Charles Williams
#3. They're beautiful hands," he said; "though they've ruined the world, they're beautiful hands.
Charles Williams
#4. Pardon,Periel, like Love, is only ours for fun: essentially we don't and can't.
Charles Williams
#5. 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.
Charles Williams
#6. 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 to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.
Charles Williams
#7. Our crucifixes exhibit the pain, but they veil, perhaps necessarily, the obscenity: but the death of the God-Man was both.
Charles Williams
#9. What's the matter with you, Madox? You got a grudge against the world?
Charles Williams
#10. 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.
Charles Williams
#11. 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.
Charles Williams
#12. 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.
Charles Williams
#13. Her mouth was soft and moist, and she came to me like a dachshund jumping into your lap.
Charles Williams
#14. An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.
Charles Williams
#16. 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.
Charles Williams
#17. [ ... ] the war between good and evil existed no longer, for the thing beneath the Graal was not fighting but vomiting.
Charles Williams
#18. Why isn't one taught how to be loved? Why isn't one taught anything?
Charles Williams
#19. 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.
Charles Williams
#20. It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else.
Charles Williams
#21. Sir Joshua Reynolds, said Jonathan, once alluded to 'common observation and a plain understanding' as the source of all art.
Charles Williams
#22. It is as pleasant as it is unusual to see thoroughly good people getting their deserts.
Charles Williams
#23. Play and pray; but on the whole do not pray when you are playing and do not play when you are praying.
Charles Williams
#24. 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.
Charles Williams
#25. 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.
Charles Williams
#26. Unless devotion is given to the thing which must prove false in the end, the thing that is true in the end cannot enter.
Charles Williams
#27. 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.
Charles Williams
#28. You can take care of everything except chance. Chance can kill you.
Charles Williams
#29. , 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.
Charles Williams
#30. Every contrition for sin is apt to encourage a not quite charitable wish that other people should exhibit a similar contrition.
Charles Williams
#31. I think in order to move forward into the future, you need to know where you've been.
Charles Williams
#32. Many promising reconciliations have broken down because while both parties come prepared to forgive, neither party come prepared to be forgiven.
Charles Williams
#33. 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.
Charles Williams
#34. 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.
Charles Williams
#35. The girl was in fact so patient with the old lady that she had not yet noticed that she was never given an opportunity to be patient. She endured her own nature and supposed it to be the burden of another's.
Charles Williams
#36. How can one bargain for anything that is worth while? And what else is worth bargaining for?
Charles Williams
#37. She sat the sister of Arthur, the wife of Lot
four sons got by him, and one not.
Charles Williams
#38. Love was even more mathematical than poetry. It was the pure mathematics of the spirit.
Charles Williams
#39. 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.
Charles Williams
#40. 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.
Charles Williams
#41. The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.
Charles Williams
#42. Nothing was certain, but everything was safe - that was part of the mystery of Love.
Charles Williams
#43. 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.
Charles Williams
#44. 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.
Charles Williams
#45. 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.
Charles Williams
#46. If the redeemed sing, presumably someone must write the songs.
Charles Williams
#47. Over the white curve he had looked into incredible space; abysses of intelligence lay beyond it.
Charles Williams
#48. 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.
Charles Williams
#49. 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.
Charles Williams
#50. 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.
Charles Williams
#51. 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.
Charles Williams
#52. A man cannot love himself; he can only idolize it, and over the idol delightfully tyrannize - without purpose. The great gift which the simple idolatry of self gives is lack of further purpose
Charles Williams
#53. And jewels and words are no less and no more necessary than cotton and silence.
Charles Williams
#54. The altar must be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another place.
Charles Williams
#55. The strong hands of God twisted the crown of thorns into a crown of glory; and in such hands we are safe.
Charles Williams
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