-
We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
C. S. Lewis
-
This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea, and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal.
C. S. Lewis
-
One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.
C. S. Lewis
-
All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
C. S. Lewis
-
If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
C. S. Lewis
-
'God' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape.
C. S. Lewis
-
Satan always sends error into the world in pairs that are opposites. His great hope is that you will get so upset about one of his errors, that you'll react into the opposite one, and he's got you.
C. S. Lewis
-
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'
C. S. Lewis
-
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
-
The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back to the simple principles, which we're so anxious not to see.
C. S. Lewis
-
A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
C. S. Lewis
-
This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
C. S. Lewis
-
The real moon,if you could reach it and survive it, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else...no man would find an abiding strangness on the moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.
C. S. Lewis
-
'Milton was right…' The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery…
C. S. Lewis
-
We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ.
C. S. Lewis
-
When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing tastes, interests and capacity of his audience. These no less than the language , the marble, the paint, are part of his aw material.; to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored or defied. Haughty indifference to them is not genius, it is laziness and incompetence.
C. S. Lewis
-
'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
-
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.
C. S. Lewis
-
When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest eldil, is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!
C. S. Lewis
-
They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?
C. S. Lewis
-
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
-
God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.
C. S. Lewis
-
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
C. S. Lewis
-
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis
