-
Catch {a man} at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, "By jove, I'm being humble," and almost immediately pride - pride at his own humility - will appear.
C. S. Lewis
-
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
C. S. Lewis
-
You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.
C. S. Lewis
-
He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.
C. S. Lewis
-
They were pretty tired by now of course; but not what I’d call bitterly tired – only slow and feeling very dreamy and tired as one does when one is coming to the end of a long day in the open.
C. S. Lewis
-
The Christians say that God has done miracles. The modern world, even when it believes in God, and even when it has see the defenselessness of nature, does not. It thinks God would not do that sort of thing.
C. S. Lewis
-
Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?
C. S. Lewis
-
Beloved," said the Glorious One, "unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.
C. S. Lewis
-
We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.
C. S. Lewis
-
It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
C. S. Lewis
-
Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head, but don't be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud, one is safe from the worst form of pride.
C. S. Lewis
-
The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.
C. S. Lewis
-
No, I don’t wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.
C. S. Lewis
-
There are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid and disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine because that is how God loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but He delights to give.
C. S. Lewis
-
The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can't both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn't fit the real universe. Consequently, with the best will in the world, he will be helping his fellow creatures to their destruction.
C. S. Lewis
-
Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly.
C. S. Lewis
-
And all the time - such is the tragic comedy of our situation - we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C. S. Lewis
-
My son, by all means desist from kicking the venerable and enlightened Vizier: for as a costly jewel retains its value even if hidden in a dung-hill, so old age and discretion are to be respected even in the vile persons of our subjects. Desist therefore, and tell us what you desire and propose.
C. S. Lewis
-
When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?
C. S. Lewis
-
He'll be coming and going" he had said. "One day you'll see him and another you won't. He doesn't like being tied down--and of course he has other countries to attend to. It's quite all right. He'll often drop in. Only you mustn't press him. He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.
C. S. Lewis
-
Each time you fall He'll pick you up. He knows your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection
C. S. Lewis
-
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.
C. S. Lewis
-
The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds him liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.
C. S. Lewis
-
When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason. Ho, my beauties!
C. S. Lewis
