Charles Williams Quotes

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

- Charles Williams

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

- Charles Williams

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

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

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

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

- 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.

- Charles Williams

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

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

- Charles Williams

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

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

- Charles Williams

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

Hell is indefinite.

- Charles Williams