If nothing in this world satisfies me, perhaps it is because I was made for another world. C. S. Lewis
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives. - Clive Staples Lewis, The Four Loves
The best men in the estate of grace would be in darkness, and call their estate into question, if the Holy Ghost did not convince them, and answer all cavils for them; and therefore we must not only be convinced at first by the Spirit, but in our continued course of Christianity. This, therefore, should make us come to God's ordinances with holy devotion. O Lord, vouchsafe the Spirit of revelation, and take the scales from mine eyes, that as these are truths, they may be truthIf you read history, you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were just those who thought the most of the next.--C.S. Lewis
If Darwin´s theory of Evolution was correct, cats would be able to operate a can-opener by now. --C.S. Lewis
One reason why people find [Life-Force religion] so attractive is itgives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life- Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen? ~C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity".
We are quite ignorant of the real power of our habits until we try to give them up. --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) _Letter to Mrs. Percival Wiseman_ [May 26, 1942]
Jill transported to the land of Aslan is stranded in a strange forest because of pride and foolishness. She becomes extremely thirsty, finds a stream but a lion is there. The Lion bids her to come and drink. The voice was not like a man's but "deeper, wilder, and stronger" - a "sort of heavy golden voice". "May I - could I - would you mind going away while I do?", said Jill. The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its mountainous bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience. The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic. "Will you promise not to - do anything to me if you do come?", said Jill. "I make no promise, " said the Lion. Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer. "Do you eat girls?", she said. "I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms", said the Lion. It didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. it just said it. 'I daren't come and drink", said Jill. "Then you will die of thirst", said the Lion. "Oh dear!", said Jill coming a step nearer. "I supposed I must go and look for another stream then." "There is no other stream", said the Lion. C. S. LEWIS, Silver Chair
In the chapter, "Farewell to Shadowlands," the children are afraid of being sent away from Narnia. Aslan assures them that they will not - and a wild hope rises in them. Aslan tells them that there was a real railway accident. "Your father and mother and all of you are -- as you used to call it in the Shadowlands -- dead. The term is over: the holiday has begun. The dream is ended. This is the morning...things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And as for us, this is the end of all stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia have only been the cover of the Great Story which none on earth has read; which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before." C. S. LEWIS, Last Battle
I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on these grounds is that they are not true....Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters. CS Lewis
He's [God] a hedonist at heart...He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are pleasures forevermore...He's vulgar, Wormwood. He has bourgeois mind. There are things for humans to do all day long...sleeping, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it's of any use to us. C. S. LEWIS, Screwtape Letters
Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful -- horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. -- _The Screwtape Letters_
In a sense it (Christianity) creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteousness and loving. C. S. LEWIS, THE PROBLEM OF PAIN
We may think God wants actions of a certain kind, but God wants people of a certain kind. C. S. LEWIS, Mere Christianity
Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life. But of course, like autumn, it doesn't last. --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) _Letters of C.S. Lewis_ [1966], "27 October 1963"
What we have been told is how we men can be drawn into Christ - can become part of that wonderful present which the young Prince of the universe wants to offer to His Father that present which is Himself and therefore us in Him. It is the only thing we were made for. And there are strange, exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in, a great many other things in Nature will begin to come right. The bad dream will be over: it will be morning. ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Mere Christianity [1952]
It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.~C.S. Lewis 1898-1963, The Screwtape Letters (1941)
We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is "good," because it is good; if "bad" because it works in us patience, humility and contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country. --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963)_Letter to Don Giovanni Calabria_ [August 10, 1948]
We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good; if bad, because it works in us patience, humility, contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.- 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 1898-1963 , Miracles (1947)
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the old Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with completely faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence. --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) _Mere Christianity_ [1952], Book III, Chapter 5
We must never speak to simple, excitable people about "the Day" without emphasizing again and again the utter impossibility of prediction. We must try to show them that that impossibility is an essential part of the doctrine. If you do not believe our Lord's words, why do you believe in His return at all? And if you do believe them, must you not put away from you, utterly and forever, any hope of dating that return? ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), The World's Last Night
God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. Otherwise, we should have missed the great lesson that it is by his will alone that a man is good or bad, and that feelings are not, in themselves, of any importance. We should also have missed the all important help of knowing that He has faced all that the weakest of us face, has shared not only the strength of our nature but every weakness of it except sin. --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) _Letters of C.S. Lewis_ [1966], "23 February 1947"
What will you do with Jesus,
Neutral you can not be,
One day your heart will be asking,
What will He do with me.
C. S. LEWIS
I . . . strongly object to the tyrannic and unscriptural insolence of anything that calls itself a Church and makes teetotalism a condition of membership. Apart from the more serious objection (that our Lord himself turned water into wine and made wine the medium of the only rite He imposed on all His followers), . . . Don't they realize that Christianity arose in the Mediterranean world where, then as now, wine was as much part of the normal diet as bread? --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) _Letters of C.S. Lewis_ [1966], "16 March 1955"
Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased. - C S Lewis
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
We don't pray to change God. We pray to change ourselves. --C S Lewis., 'The Pilgrim's Regress'
Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist. --C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
In God you come up against something which is in every way immeasurably superior to yourself...As long as you are proud you cannot know God. --C. S. Lewis, _Mere Christianity_, Chapter 8, The Great Sin
When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all. ~C.S.Lewis, Mere Christianity.
The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. They cannot sound otherwise to those who have not had the relevant experience: that is why there is no real teaching of such truths possible and every generation starts from scratch. C S Lewis - Letters, May 1939
The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world; but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. C S Lewis ( The Problem of Pain)
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure ints healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in asense, on the Enemy's ground. I know we have won many a soulthrough pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it's better style. To getthe man's soul and give him nothing in return--that is what really gladdens our Father's heart.--C. S. Lewis, _The Screwtape Letters_
One reason why people find [Life-Force religion] so attractive is itgives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life- Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen? ~C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity".
The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be "undemocratic." These differences between pupils &endash; for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences &endash; must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modeling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have &endash; I believe the English already use the phrase &endash; "parity of esteem." An even more drastic scheme is now possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma -- Beelzebub, what a useful word! &endash; by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. --C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast (1959)
No man knows how bad he is until he has tried to be good. There is a silly idea about that good people don't know what temptation means. --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) _The Screwtape Letters_ [1941]
What in heaven's name is the idea of everyone sending everyone else pictures of stage-coaches, fairies, foxes, dogs, butterflies, kittens, flowers, etc.?... Imagine a Chinese man sitting at a table covered with small pictures. The man explains that he is preparing for the anniversary of Buddha's being protected by the dragons. Not that he personally believes that this is the real anniversary of the event or even that it really happened. He is just keeping up the old custom. Not that he has any pictures of Buddha or of the dragons. He doesn't like that kind. He says, "Here's one of a traction engine for Hu Flung Dung, and I'm sending this study of a napkin-ring to Lo Hung Git, and these jolly ones of bluebottles are for the children. ~C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warren (Christmas Eve 1939) -on the futility of celebrating the Nativity if one does not accept the Incarnation.
I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has "the freeborn mind." But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and employer? -- C.S. Lewis
Anxiety is not only a pain which we must ask God to assuage but also a weakness we must ask Him to pardon &emdash; for He's told us to take no care for the morrow. - C. S.Lewis, letter ,NOVEMBER 27, 1953,
We have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females--and there is more in that than you might suppose. --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) _The Screwtape Letters_ [1942], "Letter 20"
One needs the sweetness to start one on the spiritual life but, once started, one must learn to obey God for his own sake, not for the pleasure. -- C. S. Lewis, Letter of 11/9/1931
I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband ever wife, learned over simple, to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen Filmer would be right, and patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government. C. S. Lewis "Membership" Sobernost #31 (June 1945)
..there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows. ----C. S. Lewis "Membership" Sobernost #31 (June 1945)
What can you ever really know of other people's souls-- of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. --C. S. Lewis, _Mere Christianity_, Chapter 10
I walk in wonders beyond myself. --C. S. Lewis
Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably to the belThe vice I am talking about is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea-bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavour. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit. ... But do not let us mistake necessary evils for good. The mistake is easily made. Fruit has to be tinned if it is to be transported, and has to lose thereby some of its good qualities. But one meets people who have learned actually to prefer the tinned fruit to the fresh. A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion: to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind - if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else - then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.--C. S. Lewis "Membership" Sobernost #31 (June 1945)
The long dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the Devil.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) "The Screwtape Letters," 1941
Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about man's search for God. For me, they might as well talk about the mouse's search for a cat... C. S. LEWIS
It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) "Mere Christianity."
Man has held three views of his body. First there is that of those ascetic Pagans who called it the prison or the "tomb" of the soul, and of Christians like Fisher to whom it was a "sack of dung", food for worms, filthy, shameful, a source of nothing but temptation to bad men and humiliation to good ones. Then there are the Neo-Pagans (they seldom know Greek), the nudist and the sufferers from Dark Gods, to whom the body is glorious. But thirdly we have the view which St. Francis expressed by calling his body, "Brother Ass". All three may be---I am not sure--defensible; but give me St. Francis for my money. "Ass" is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either rever or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body. There's no living with it till we recognise that one of its functions in our lives is to play the part of buffoon. Until some theory has sophisticated them, every man, woman and child in the world knows this. The fact that we have bodies is the oldest joke there is....The highest does not stand without the lowest. There is indeed at certain moments a high poetry in the flesh itself; but also, by your leave, an irreducible element of obstinate and ludicrous unpoetry. If it does not make itself felt on one occasion, it will on another. Far better to plant it foresquare within the drama of Eros as comic relief than pretend you haven't noticed it.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Look for yourself and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.-- C. S. LEWIS
Among the Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He as God...Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was part of God, or one with God:There would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outsidethe world Who made it and was infinitely different from anything else. Andwhen you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips. C. S. Lewis
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), "Is Theology Poetry?"
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important. CS Lewis
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful until it became risky.Among the oxen (like an ox I'm slow)
I see a glory in the stable grow
Which, with the ox's dullness might at length
Give me an ox's strength.Among the asses (stubborn I as they)
I see my Saviour where I looked for hay;
So may my beast like folly learn at least
The patience of a beast.
Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed)
I watch the manger where my Lord is laid;
Oh that my baa-ing nature would win thence
Some woolly innocence!
CS Lewis The Nativity
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Screwtape Letters
If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a 'wandering to find home,' why should we not look forward to the arrival?
C.S. Lewis letter:7 June 1959
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) Mere Christianity
Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) The Problem of Pain
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) The Screwtape Letters
"You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth. Be content." C S Lewis Prince Caspian
Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) Surprised by Joy
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way." C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) The Great Divorce
He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart. C S Lewis Letters to an American Lady
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. -- C S Lewis - The Problem of Pain
The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life coming flowing in. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Can a mortal ask question which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask---half our great theological and metaphysical problems---are like that. And now that I come to think of it, there's no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I'd better get on with them. C. S. Lewis A Grief Observed
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
No man knows how bad he is until he has tried to be good. There is a silly idea about that good people don't know what temptation means. -- C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) The Screwtape Letters
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life--the the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one's 'real life' is a phantom of one's own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it's hard to remember it all the time. C.S. Lewis, The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves
The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are --C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays
When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.--C.S. Lewis , letter: 3 Aug 1959
An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy.--C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
C S Lewis--Mere Christianity
An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy.--C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
C S Lewis--Mere Christianity
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.--C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man
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 Case for Christianity
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 --The Problem of Pain
If the universe is so bad...how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? C.S. Lewis--The Problem of Pain
[God] is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him. C.S. Lewis --The Problem of Pain
If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.-- C S Lewis--Mere Christianity
Sin is the dare of God's justice, the rape of His mercy, the jeer of His patience, the slight of His power, and the contempt of His love.-- John Bunyan
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.-- H.L. Mencken
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.--C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man
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 Case for Christianity
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 --The Problem of Pain
If the universe is so bad...how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? C.S. Lewis--The Problem of Pain
[God] is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him. C.S. Lewis --The Problem of Pain
If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.-- C S Lewis--Mere Christianity
Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed. -- C.S. Lewis--The Case for Christianity
'Safe?' said Mr. Beaver...'Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. but he's good. He's the King, I tell you.'
C S Lewis--The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, "If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realize that this also is God." The Christian replies, "Don't talk damned nonsense." --C. S. Lewis, _The Case for Christianity_, 1943
[Pain] removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul. -- C.S. Lewis --The Problem of Pain
What makes some theological works like sawdust to me is the way the authors can go on discussing how far certain positions are adjustable to contemporary thought, or beneficial in relation to social problems, or "have a future" before them, but never squarely ask what grounds we have for supposing them to be true accounts of any objective reality. As if we were trying to make rather than to learn. Have we no Other to reckon with?... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
All [Christian churches] regard divorce as something like cutting up a living body, as a kind of surgical operation. Some of them think the operation so violent that it cannot be done at all; others admit it as a desperate remedy in extreme cases. They are all agreed that it is more like having both your legs cut off than it is like dissolving a business partnership or even deserting a regiment. What they all disagree with is the modern view that it is a simple readjustment of partners, to be made whenever people feel they are no longer in love with one another, or when either of them falls in love with someone else.
C S Lewis-- _Mere Christianity_
Now Faith...is the art of holding on to things your reason 'has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.
C S Lewis -- _Mere Christianity_
An "impersonal God"-- well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads -- better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap -- best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps, approaching an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband -- that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ("Man's search for God!") suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?
C. S. Lewis, "Miracles" (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p.94
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
LEWIS, CLIVE STAPLES (1898-1963)
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. C S Lewis
We're 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, "Letters of C.S. Lewis", 29 April, 1959, para. 1, pg. 285.
I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was "Feed my sheep", not "Try experiments on my rats", or even "Teach my performing dogs new tricks".. C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964 , pp. 4-5.
The [Christian] "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed inlanguage more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), letter
We must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear, but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame, or struck dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations. ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), God in the Dock
[Milton's] argument is (a) St. Augustine was wrong in thinking God's only purpose in giving Adam a female, instead of a male, companion, was copulation. For (b) there is a "peculiar comfort" in the society of man and woman "beside, (i.e. in addition to, apart from) the genial bed"; and (c) we know from Scripture that something analogous to "play" or "slackening the cords" occurs even in God. That is why the Song of Songs describes a thousand raptures...far on the hither side of carnal enjoyment. --C. S. Lewis, _Preface to Paradise Lost_,
I see only one thing to do at the moment. Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him 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 at his own humility will appear.--C. S. Lewis, _The Screwtape Letters_
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. -- C.S. Lewis
If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.--C.S. Lewis
The very strength and facility of the pessimists' case at once poses us a problem. If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must have always been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Problem of Pain
There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians ever imagine that they are guilty themselves....The essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil; Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind...As long as you are proud you cannot know God. 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, Mere Christianity
When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.... When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased. - C.S. Lewis , letter: 8 Nov 1952
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.--C.S. Lewis _Mere Christianity_
We keep on assuming that we know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows. _The World's Last Night_, C. S. Lewis
I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity. -- C. S. Lewis
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 save 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. C.S. Lewis
I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to "rejoice" as much as by anything else. -- C. S. Lewis, _The Problem of Pain_, 1944
Gambling ought never to be an important part of a man's life. If it is a way in which large sums of money are transferred from person to person without doing any good (e.g., producing employment, goodwill, etc.) then it is a bad thing. If it is carried out on a small scale, I am not sure that it is bad. I don't know much about it, becauseit is about the only vice to which I have no temptation at all, and I think it is a risk to talk about things which are not in my own make-up, because I don't understand them. If anyone comes to me asking to play bridge for money, I just say: "How much do you hope to win? Take it and go away." --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) _God in the Dock_ [1948], "Answers to Questions on Christianity," Question 13
In most parts of the Bible, everything is implicitly or explicitly introduced with "Thus saith the Lord". It is... not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite -- it excludes or repels -- the merely aesthetic approach. You can read it as literature only by a tour de force... It demands incessantly to be taken on its own terms: it will not continue to give literary delight very long, except to those who go to it for something quite different. I predict that it will in the future be read, as it always has been read, almost exclusively by Christians. ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), They Asked for a Paper
Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it. --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) _Mere Christianity_ [1952], Book 4, Chapter 7
I am delighted to hear that you have taken to Johnson. Yes, isn't it a magnificent style--the very essence of manliness and condensation. . . . I personally get more pleasure from the Rambler than from anything else of his and at one time I used to read a Rambler every evening as a nightcap. --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) _The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves_ [1986], "22 June 1930"
Your Hindus certainly sound delightful. But what do they deny? That's always been my trouble with Indians--to find any proposition they would pronounce false. But truth must surely involve exclusions? --Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) _Letters of C.S. Lewis_ [1966], "8 February 1956" (In a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.B. who was in India at the time.)
No comments:
Post a Comment