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Mr. Sensible learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend.
C. S. Lewis
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Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
C. S. Lewis
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If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic - to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them.
C. S. Lewis
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But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.
C. S. Lewis
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Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.
C. S. Lewis
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This is where men, even the trustiest, fail us. Their heart is never so wholly given to any matter but that some trifle of a meal, or a drink, or a sleep, or a joke, or a girl, may come in between them and it, and then (even if you are a queen) you'll get no more good out of them until they've had their way.
C. S. Lewis
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The thing is to rely on God. The time will come when you will regard all this misery as a small price to pay for having been brought to that dependence. Meanwhile, the trouble is that relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing has yet been done.
C. S. Lewis
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Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.
C. S. Lewis
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I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?
C. S. Lewis
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Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.
C. S. Lewis
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If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.
C. S. Lewis
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People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
C. S. Lewis
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A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
C. S. Lewis
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What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. Highest Common Factor, and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.
C. S. Lewis
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The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements.
C. S. Lewis
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Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.
C. S. Lewis
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When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.
C. S. Lewis
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I am sorry that my convictions do not allow me to repeat my friend’s offer, said one of the others. But I have had to abandon the humanitarian and egalitarian fancies. His name was Mr. Neo-Classical.
C. S. Lewis
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Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C. S. Lewis
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Not my idea of God, but God.
C. S. Lewis
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But supposing one tries to live by Pantheistic philosophy? Does it lead to a complacent Hegelian optimism?
C. S. Lewis
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'They would say,' he answered, 'that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.'
C. S. Lewis
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This is where dreams-dreams, do you understand-come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.
C. S. Lewis
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God is not a static thing...but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.
C. S. Lewis
