Remarks by Charles Williams | V2Melody Quotations

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

Childlikeness as honesty about immaturity rather than charm · Commonly attributed remark

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

A dry rule for keeping joy and devotion distinct in act · Commonly attributed remark

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

Suffering remade rather than merely removed · Theological writing, commonly attributed

“I think that, in the last resort, a set of people has the right and I fear the duty to say something like this: the conditions under which you insist that we and others live are, quite simply, intolerable.”

Reluctant acceptance that force may sometimes stop intolerable wrong · Letter to Thelma Shuttleworth, 1940

“My own muddles are written over the earth and heaven, but I take refuge in God and the Order, and hope, under the Mercy, to smile at them all in the end.”

Hope that disorder in a life may still be gathered up · Late letter to a friend

“The devil, even if he is a fact, has been an indulgence; while he exists, there is always something to which we can be superior.”

Satan as a convenient object of unearned pride · The Descent of the Dove

“Poetry is the noblest of human activities.”

A passing definition of the art he practised · Poetry at Present, 1930

“No knowledge of Dogmatic Theology is a substitute for a saving faith; nor of Moral Theology for the formation of the habit of moral obedience; nor of Mystical Theology for the practice of communion with God.”

Theory may help practice but cannot replace it · Outlines of Romantic Theology

“See, understand, enjoy, said the Gnostic; repent, believe, love, said the Church, and if you see anything by the way, say so.”

Knowledge without conversion is not the Christian way · The Descent of the Dove

“All great art creates, as it were, its own stillness about it, but by the nature of its subject the Bible does more.”

Scripture as art that opens a silence before creation · He Came Down from Heaven

“You can’t imagine how I dislike people’s faces. Only the conventions of years of social behaviour stop me, I sometimes feel, shouting at them.”

Irritable honesty about social dislike · Letter, 15 October 1943

“There are wells of hate in one which are terrifying, and wells of suspicion and even malice.”

A frank admission of interior darkness behind his public charity · Letter to Michal Williams, about 1939

“It was, perhaps, the only certainly wise thing I have ever done; marrying you. The whole effect of You on me will only be known on the Day of Judgement.”

Marriage as the one decision he would not unsay · Letter to his wife, 1943

“I believe that Bear one another’s burdens is a truth to which we have only dimly seen the way.”

Early statement of his doctrine of substitution and co-inherence · Letter to Anne Bradby, 1931

“It is clear to me that marriage is a substance, a thing of solid existence, like very few things; I should myself add religion and great art, but I do not press that.”

Marriage treated as a real created thing, not a mood · Letter to his wife, 1939

“I am the least of God’s creatures, but I have done something in my time, and I only did it through having suffered. Two or three times in my life I have felt I should really go off my head; did I? No; and beyond all my beliefs the result is greater than anything. Adored always be the Omnipotence.”

Work and sanity credited to endurance under God · Letter to his son, 1941

“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.”

Human pardon is part of the same humility as divine pardon · Review in Time and Tide, 1941

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

Forgiveness fails when pride will not receive it · Essay collected in The Image of the City

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

Even passing loves may be a door to what lasts · He Came Down from Heaven

“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.”

Love named of God is not mere warmth but something austere · He Came Down from Heaven

“This also is Thou; neither is this Thou.”

His favoured maxim for holding affirmation and denial together · Preface, The Descent of the Dove, 1939

“Deep, deeper than we believe, lie the roots of sin; it is in the good that they exist; it is in the good that they thrive and send up sap and produce the black fruit of hell.”

Evil grows most dangerously inside what claims to be holy · The Descent of the Dove, 1939

“Christianity and life ought to be one.”

Faith is not a separate compartment from ordinary living · The Forgiveness of Sins, 1942

“If one is anxious to write about God, one ought to be anxious to write well.”

Craft and reverence belong together when the subject is sacred · Essay, The Productions of Time, Time and Tide, 1941

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