C. S. Lewis on atheism

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’

If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.

Goncourt brothersJanuary 24, 1868; translation from Robert Baldick (ed. and trans.) Pages from the Goncourt Journal (London: Oxford University Press, 1962) p. 135.

• Religion

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed. For the duel is deadly; and any agnostic who wishes to be anything more than a Nihilist must sympathize with one version of nature or the other.

G. K. Chesterton1874–1936The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), Ch. II: The Great Victorian Novelists (p. 73)

If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.

G. K. Chesterton1874–1936Where All Roads Lead