-
He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.
C. S. Lewis
-
It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.
C. S. Lewis
-
To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek Calends.
C. S. Lewis
-
There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.
C. S. Lewis
-
She stepped out from among their shifting confusion of lovely lights and shadows. A circle of grass, smooth as a lawn, met her eyes, with dark trees dancing all around it. And then --Oh Joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him.
C. S. Lewis
-
And that's why, gentleman, if your little girl doesn't come up to scratch, it will be our painful duty to cut all your throats. Merely in a way of business, as you might say, and no offense, I hope.
C. S. Lewis
-
It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that 'from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.' To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.
C. S. Lewis
-
Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading
C. S. Lewis
-
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.
C. S. Lewis
-
I#pray because the need flows out of me all the time-walking and sleeping. It does not change # God - it changes me.
C. S. Lewis
-
We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.
C. S. Lewis
-
God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity ... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him.
C. S. Lewis
-
[Repentance] means unlearning all the self-conceit and self -will that we have been training ourselves into... It means killing part of yourself, under-going a kind of death.
C. S. Lewis
-
The notion that everyone would like Christianity to be true, and therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense.
C. S. Lewis
-
The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.
C. S. Lewis
-
There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.
C. S. Lewis
-
Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.
C. S. Lewis
-
We must beware of the Past, mustn't we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved.
C. S. Lewis
-
It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.
C. S. Lewis
-
Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult.
C. S. Lewis
-
But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.
C. S. Lewis
-
All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.
C. S. Lewis
-
There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them.
C. S. Lewis
-
But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder.
C. S. Lewis
