Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898 and died on November 22, 1963 (the same day as John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley died).
He grew up a stubborn atheist but came to a point when the evidence of God was so powerful, that he could no longer cling to his disbelief. In 1929, he writes, "I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed...." Two years later he moved from theism to belief in Jesus Christ.
He was a Professor of Literature at Oxford University for 29 years and at Cambridge University for the last 9 years of his life.
He was a premier stateman for Christianity and a reasoned faith. His works of literature (The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy) sparked the imaginations of young and old. His contributions to the tome of Christian Thought with Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain gave voice to a faith with reason in the 20th Century. His writings about suffering and pain in A Grief Observed gave hope to those who hurt and struggle with God over their condition.
A chronology of his life can be found at:
http://www.cslewis.org/about/index.html
Following are some quotes taken from the body of his works.
We laugh at honor, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
--- C.S. Lewis
He who takes his life for granted is a pencil without an eraser.
- C.S. Lewis, In Humanity
I think when we get those moments where things are just too hard to comprehend, there is a whole different world.
- C.S. Lewis, In Places
A God. The God. One word can make all the difference in the world.
- C.S. Lewis, In Religion
"Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowlege of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future."
- C.S. Lewis, In Education
I believe in God like I believe in the sun rise. Not because I can see it, but because I can see all that it touches.
- C.S. Lewis, In Religion
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
- C.S. Lewis, In Freedom
Time hasn't stopped for any troubles, heartaches, or any other malfunctions of this world, so please don't tell me it will stop for you.
- C.S. Lewis, In Time
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art . . . it has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival.
- C.S. Lewis, In Friendship
Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased.
- C.S. Lewis, In Humanity
Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.
- C.S. Lewis, In Humanity
100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.
- C.S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory", In Death
An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut.
- The Abolition of Man
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation.
- Christian Reflections, The Poison of Subjectivism
The only way in which I can make real to myself . . . the heinousness of sin is to remember that every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us--an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof “God did it” and “I did it” are both true descriptions. We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument. . . . Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege
- Letter to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer
Right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character called a “virtue,” and it is this quality or character that really matters.
There is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all you reasoning power comes: you could not be right and he wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.
- Mere Christianity
All the essentials of Hinduism would, I think, remain unimpaired if you subtracted the miraculous, and the same is almost true of Mohammedanism. But you cannot do that with Christianity. It is precisely the story of a great Miracle. A naturalistic Christianity leaves out all that is specifically Christian.
- Miracles
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.
- The Great Divorce
"The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys..."
--Mere Christianity
"The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation."
--The Weight of Glory
"You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness."
--The Weight of Glory
"Perfect humility dispenses with modesty."
--The Weight of Glory
"If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself."
--The Weight of Glory
"When humans should have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch."
--The Weight of Glory
"As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism."
--The Weight of Glory
"No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'"
--The Weight of Glory
"We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship."
--The Weight of Glory
"To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek Calends."
--The Weight of Glory
"100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased."
--The Weight of Glory
"When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude...that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing."
--The Weight of Glory
"Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later."
--The Case for Christianity
"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."
--The Case for Christianity
"Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it."
--The Case for Christianity
"Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other."
--The Case for 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."
--The Case for Christianity
"Badness is only spoiled goodness."
--The Case for Christianity
"God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form...The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man."
--The Case for Christianity
"Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it."
--The Case for Christianity
"It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men."
--Reflections on the Psalms
"I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation."
--Reflections on the Psalms
"The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about."
--Reflections on the Psalms
"Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development--"
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?"
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Lucifer] could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"People blush at praise--not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"To fight in another man's armour is something more than to be influenced by his style of fighting."
--The Allegory of Love
"The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it."
--The Abolition of Man
"It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous."
--The Abolition of Man
"Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism."
--The Abolition of Man
"As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element.'"
--The Abolition of Man
"A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional...values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process."
--The Abolition of Man
"The preservation of society, and of the species itself, are ends that do not hang on the precarious thread of Reason: they are given by Instinct."
--The Abolition of Man
"If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them."
--The Abolition of Man
"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."
--The Abolition of Man
"Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position."
--The Abolition of Man
"If we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity..."
--The Abolition of Man
"What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument."
--The Abolition of Man
"Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man."
--The Abolition of Man
"No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power."
--The Abolition of Man
"You have gone into the Temple...and found Him, as always, there."
--from a letter "To A Lady"
"Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done..."
--from a letter "To Mrs. L." (50)
"...art can teach without at all ceasing to be art."
--from a letter to "I.O. Evans"
"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?"
--The Problem of Pain
"Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."
--The Problem of Pain
"Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal."
--The Problem of Pain
"When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy."
--The Problem of Pain
"When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary."
--The Problem of Pain
"If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally."
--The Problem of Pain
"Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment."
--The Problem of Pain
"Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one..."
--The Problem of Pain
"The 'frankness' of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness."
--The Problem of Pain
"We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin."
--The Problem of Pain
"It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork."
--The Problem of Pain
"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
--The Problem of Pain
"[Pain] removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul."
--The Problem of Pain
"We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it."
--The Problem of Pain
"It matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth."
--The Problem of Pain
"Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask."
--The Problem of Pain
"[God] is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him."
--The Problem of Pain
"If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?"
--The Problem of Pain
"Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless."
--The Problem of Pain
"Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere "opiate of the people" have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor."
--The Problem of Pain
"Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time."
--The Problem of Pain
"Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire."
--The Problem of Pain
"Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you."
--The Problem of Pain
"God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love."
--The Problem of Pain
"No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights."
--Reflections on the Psalms
"An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath."
--Surprised by Joy
"To be discontinuous from God as I am discontinuous from you would be annihilation."
--Letters to Malcolm
"'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.'"
--Prince Caspian
"Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it."
--The World's Last Night
"Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is..."
--Mere Christianity
"Nothing is yet in its true form."
--Till We Have Faces
"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."
--Mere Christianity
"If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?"
--Encounter with Light
"It now seemed that...the deepest thirst within him was not adapted to the deepest nature of the world."
--The Pilgrim's Regress
"Though I do not believe that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will."
--Transposition and Other addresses
"We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness..."
--Transposition and Other addresses
"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."
--Till We Have Faces
"There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes."
--The Last Battle
"The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting."
--Surprised by Joy
"All joy...emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings."
--from an unknown letter
"Joy is the serious business of Heaven."
--Letters to Malcolm
"'You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,'" said the Lion."
--The Silver Chair
"A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere--'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous."
--Surprised by Joy
"Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices."
--Perelandra
"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself."
--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."
--Mere Christianity
"Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self..."
--Mere Christianity
"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves."
--On Three Ways of Writing for Children
"The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle."
--On Three Ways of Writing for Children (100)
"Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also."
--The Allegory of Love
"If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all."
--The Abolition of Man
"The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary colour in the spectrum..."
--Christian Reflections
"The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike...Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish."
--Christian Reflections
"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..."
--Mere Christianity
"If we retain only what can be justified by standards of prudence and convenience at he bar of enlightened common sense, then we exchange revelation for that old wraith Natural Religion."
--'Notes on the Way', Time and Tide
"When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all."
--Mere Christianity
"If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes...it cuts its own throat."
--A Christian Reply to Professor Price
"Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe."
--Christian Reflections
"A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid..."
--Christian Reflections
"The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time."
--Christian Reflections
"Morality or duty...never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others."
--English Literature in the 16th Century
"You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house."
--Mere Christianity
"There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails...If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft."
--Mere Christianity
"Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience."
--The Problem of Pain
"All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt."
--The Problem of Pain
"[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation."
--The Problem of Pain
"The road to the promised land runs past Sinai."
--The Problem of Pain
"Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst."
--Reflections on the Psalms
"It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies."
--The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment
"Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already."
--The Great Divorce
"I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."
--The Silver Chair
"Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all."
--Letters to Malcolm
"[One] can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity."
--The Problem of Pain
"Human intellect is incurably abstract."
--Myth Became Fact, World Dominion
"The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think."
--Myth Became Fact, World Dominion
"You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter."
--Myth Became Fact, World Dominion
"The surest way of spoiling a pleasure [is] to start examining your satisfaction."
--Surprised by Joy
"History is a story written by the finger of God."
--Christian Reflections
"This moment contains all moments."
--The Great Divorce
"Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?"
--Christian Reflections
"So many things--nay every real thing--is good if only it will be humble and ordinate."
--Letters
"There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious."
--An Experiment in Criticism
"If there is equality it is in His love, not in us."
--Transposition and Other Addresses
"Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live."
--Transposition and Other Addresses
"Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many..."
--'Notes on the Way' Time and Tide
"Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves."
--'Notes on the Way' Time and Tide
"The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior."
--The Screwtape Letters
"They do not get their qualities from a class: they belong to that class because they have those qualities."
--'Delinquents in the Snow' Time and Tide
"He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself..."
--Transposition and Other Addresses
"The true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end."
--The World's Last Night
"The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost."
--Surprised by Joy
"We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism--the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good."
--'Hedonics' Time and Tide
"Many things--such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly--are done worst when we try hardest to do them."
--Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
"Conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it."
--Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
"The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it."
--Surprised by Joy
"Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions."
--A Grief Observed
"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."
--Encounter With Light
"Now that I am a Christian I do not 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."
--Mere Christianity
"Looking for God--or Heaven--by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters..."
--'The Seeing Eye', Christian Reflections (150)
"Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion."
--Miracles
"Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly."
--They Asked for a Paper
"Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated."
--Letters (25 May 1962)
"Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible."
--Reflections on the Psalms
"For whatever else the religious life may be, it is the fountain of self-knowledge and disillusion, the safest form of psychoanalysis."
--Book Review, Review of English Studies
"The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance."
--Reflections on the Psalms
"We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God."
--Letters to Malcolm
"The difference [God's] timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite."
--Letters (1 August 1949)
"Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it."
--The Problem of Pain
"No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'."
--Miracles
"Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality."
--Letters to Malcolm
"Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful."
--The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment
"Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot form their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity."
--Perelandra
"God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense."
--The Problem of Pain
"'Yes,' said Queen Lucy. 'In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.'"
--The Last Battle
"'How can I step out of [God's] will save into something that cannot be wished?'"
--Perelandra
"'Don't you mind him,' said Puddleglum. 'There are no accidents. Our guide is Aslan.'"
--The Silver Chair
"'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.'"
--The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
"'Then instantly the pale brightness of the mist and the fiery brightness of the Lion rolled themselves together into a swirling glory and gathered themselves up and disappeared.'"
--The Horse and His Boy
"Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death."
--Letters (c. September 1940)
"Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?"
--Letters to Malcolm
"'When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.'"
--The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
"Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control."
--Miracles
"The idea which...shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience."
--The World's Last Night
"To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it."
--The World's Last Night
"'Something of God...flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.'"
--'Scraps', St. James' Magazine
"'We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge--the last thing we know before things become too swift for us.'"
--Out of the Silent Planet
"These things are not strange, Small One, though they are beyond our senses."
--Out of the Silent Planet
"A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers--including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower."
--A Preface to Paradise Lost
"Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side."
--Surprised by Joy
"You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to 'know of the doctrine'."
--Surprised by Joy
"Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us..."
--Letters to Malcolm
"We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument...Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege."
--Letters to Malcolm
"...of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men."
--That Hideous Strength
"And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies' plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger."
--The Last Battle
"To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."
--A Preface to 'Paradise Lost'
"The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence."
--Perelandra
"Hatred obscures all distinctions."
--'On Science Fiction', Of Other Worlds
"Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself."
--The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treader'
"The gravitation away from God, 'the journey homeward to habitual self', must, we think, be a product of the Fall."
--The Problem of Pain
"All that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."
--Mere Christianity
"Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat."
--Foreword to Joy Davidman's Smoke on the Mountain
"The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe."
--Mere Christianity
"[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that."
--Mere Christianity
"This act of self-will on the part of the creature, which constitutes an utter falseness to its true creaturely position, is the only sin that can be conceived as the Fall."
--The Problem of Pain
"The essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends..."
--A Christian Reply to Professor Price' Phoenix Quarterly
"From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it."
--The Problem of Pain
"At this very moment you and I are either committing [selfishness], or about to commit it, or repenting it."
--The Problem of Pain
"The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success."
--The Problem of Pain
"Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger."
--The Problem of Pain (200)
"The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ."
--Mere Christianity
"'Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death.'"
--The Great Divorce
"A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun."
--The Problem of Pain
"For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being."
--The Problem of Pain
"What is outside the system of self-giving is no earth, nor nature, nor 'ordinary life', but simply and solely Hell. Yet even Hell derives from this law such reality as it has."
--The Problem of Pain
"That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality..."
--The Problem of Pain
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
--Answers to Questions on Christianity
"In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person's place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity."
--An Experiment in Criticism
"In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are."
C.S. Lewis
Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God you learn.
--- C. S. Lewis
You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better - the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read."
- C. S. Lewis
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"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."
- C.S. Lewis
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Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth. -- C. S. Lewis (Selected Literary Essays)
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Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. -- C. S. Lewis (That Hideous Strength)
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The truley wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who "happen to be there." Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves odder than you could have believed and worth more than you had guessed. -- C. S. Lewis (The Four Loves)
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When two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also--I must put it crudely--good people; controlled, loyal, fairminded, mutually adaptable people. -- C. S. Lewis (God In The Dock: "We Have No Right to Happiness")
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The surest means of disarming an anger or a lust was to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction. But if so, it followed that all introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try to look "inside ourselves" and to see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a momement before is stopped by the act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what is left behind by is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The great error is to mistake this mere sediment or tract or by-product for the activities themselves. That is how men may come to beleive that thought is only unspoken words, or the appreciation of poetry only a collection of mental pictures, when these in reality are what the thought or the appreciation, when interrupted, leave behind--like the swell at sea, working after the the wind has dropped. Not, of course, that these activities, before we stopped them by introspection, were unconscious. We do not love, fear, or think without knowing it. Instead of the twofold division into Conscious and Unconscious we need a threefold division: the Unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplated.
-- C. S. Lewis (Suprised by Joy)
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Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.
-- C. S. Lewis (Studies in Words)
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One of the most important and effective uses of language is the emotional. It is also, of course, wholly legitimate. We do not talk only in order to reason or to inform. We have to make love and quarrel, to propitiate and pardon, to rebuke, console, intercede, and arouse. "He that complains," said Johnson, "acts like a man, like a social being." The real objection lies not against the language of emotion as such, but against language which, being in reality emotional, masquerades--whether by plain hypocrisy or subtler self-deceit--as being something else.
-- C. S. Lewis (Studies in Words)
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A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others...Thus while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people's rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish. -- C. S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters)
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If all men stood talking of their rights before they went up a mast or down a sewer or stoked a furnace or joined an army, we should all perish; nor while they talked of their rights would they learn to do these things...The man preoccupied with his own rights is not only a disastrous, but a very unlovely object; indeed, one of the worst mischiefs we do by treating a man unjustly is that we force him to be thus preoccupied.
-- C. S. Lewis (Selected Literary Essays)
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you can't see something that's above you.
A man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.
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
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...it has no survival value; rather, it is one of those things that give value to survival.
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey "people." People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest....
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.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
What it means to be labeled a Christian
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 10-11
Now if once we allow people to start spiritualising and refining, or as they might say "deepening," the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word [as gentlemen did]. In the first place, Christians themselves will never be able to apply it to anyone. It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men's hearts. We cannot judge, and indeed are forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word that we can never apply is not going to be a very useful word. As for the unbelievers, they will no doubt cheerfully use the word in the refined sense. It will become in their mouth's simply a term of praise. In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served.
We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning. The name Christian was first given at Antioch (Acts 11:26) to "the disciples," to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles. There is no question of its being restricted to those who profited by that teaching as much as they should have. There is no question of its being extended to those who in some refined, spiritual, inward fashion were "far closer to the spirit of Christ" than the less satisfactory of the disciples. The point is not a theological, or moral one. It is only a questions of words so that we can all understand what is being said. When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.
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A meaningless universe?
C.S.Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 46
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.
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Not what God willed, but what His will made possible.
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 52
Christians, then, believe that an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World. And, of course, that raises problems. Is this state of affairs in accordance with God's will or not? If it is, He is a strange God, you will say: and if it is not, how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?
But anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in accordance with your will in one way and not in another. It may be quite sensible for a mother to say to the children, "I'm not going to go and make you tidy the schoolroom every night. You've got to learn to keep it tidy on your own." Then she goes up one night and finds the Teddy bear and the ink and the French Grammar all lying in the grate. That is against her will. She would prefer the children to be tidy. But on the other hand, it is her will which has left the children free to be untidy. The same thing arises in any regiment, or trade union, or school. You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will made it possible.
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Can we be right and God wrong?
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 53
Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe is a price worth paying for free will--that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings--then we make take it it is worth paying.
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Jesus Christ--a good moral teacher?
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 56
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a good moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg-or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
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Jesus' death and suffering lose their value if He is God.
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 61
I have heard some people complain that if Jesus was God as well as man, then His sufferings and death lose all value in their eyes, "because it must have been so easy for him." Others may (very rightly) rebuke the ingratitude and ungraciousness of this objection; what staggers me is the misunderstanding it betrays. In one sense, of course, those who make it are right. They have even understated their own case. The perfect submission, the perfect suffering, the perfect death were not only easier to Jesus because He was God, but were possible only because He was God. But surely that is a very odd reason for not accepting them? The teacher is able to for the letters for the child because the teacher is grown-up and knows how to write. That, of course, makes it easier for the teacher; and only because it is easier for him can he help the child. If it rejected him because "it's easy for grown-ups" and waited to learn writing from another child who could not write itself (and so had no "unfair" advantage), it would not get on very quickly. If I am drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one foot on the bank may give me a hand which saves my life. Ought I to shout back (between my gasps) "No, its not fair!" You have an advantage! You're keeping one foot on the bank"? That advantage--call it "unfair" if you like--is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?
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Those who have never heard.
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 65
Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him. But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ's body, the organism through which he works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work.
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One reason Christians should not judge.
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 86-87
Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.
It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as friends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But god does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.
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Admitting your a bad person.
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 88
When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. YOu can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both bad and evil: bad people do not know about either.
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War, jail, and "thou shalt not kill.".
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 106-107
Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment--even to death. If one committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentance a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. I always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian, and long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace. It is no good quoting "Thou shalt not kill." there are two Greek words: the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder. And when Christ quotes that commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. and I am told there is the same distinction in Hebrew. All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery. When soldiers came to St. John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: nor did Christ when he met a Roman sergeant-major--what they call a centurion. The idea of the knight--the Christian in arms for defence of a good cause--is one of the great Christian ideas. War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken.
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Heaven and Hell.
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 121-122
There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of "Heaven" ridiculous by saying that they do not want "to spend eternity playing harps." The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written fro grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolic attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share his splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.
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Christianity--a religion or a relationship?
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 132
I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond.
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Theology, creeds, and church doctrine.
C.S. Lewis 'Mere Christianity' page 135-136
In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F. an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, "I've no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I'm a religious too. I know there's a God. I've felt him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that's just why I don't believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who's met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!"
Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is only admittedly coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.
I prefer to combat the thought "I am better than others" not with the thought of "I am no better than others" but with "Everyone is as good as me" - C. S. Lewis (paraphrase)
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The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God. - 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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Pain is a megaphone God uses to get our attention. - C. S. Lewis
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Virtue --even attempted virtue--brings light; indulgence brings fog.
- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality
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C. S. Lewis said when he died he didn't want anyone to make a fuss. He died the same day
John F. Kennedy was assassinated. There wasn't much fuss.
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The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity: The Great Sin
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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. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
- C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters
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urging against making young people read newspapers:
[N]early all that a boy reads... will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact. Most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism.
- C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
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[A]n author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.
- C. S. Lewis
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"Rulers have become owners. We are less their subject than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business."
- C. S. Lewis
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"I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the free-born 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 criticize 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
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"Courage is every virtue at the breaking point."
- C. S. Lewis
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Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
- C. S. Lewis
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The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
- C. S. Lewis
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The greatest evil is done not in sordid dens of crime, or even in concentration camps. In those we
see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered...in clean... warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars... who do not need to raise their voices.
- C. S. Lewis (perhaps a paraphrase?)
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The greatest danger for those who love God and politics was that they would come to see their faith as a means to their political ends.
- C. S. Lewis
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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
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You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
- C. S. Lewis
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We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
- C. S. Lewis
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Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
Mere Christianity, book 3, chapter 10
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Of Other Worlds
When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.
Mere Christianity, book 2, chapter 3
I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.
The Silver Chair, chapter 12
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed.
Mere Christianity, book 2, chapter 2
Many things—such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly—are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
Can a mortal ask questions 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.
A Grief Observed, chapter 4
We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all'. . .
The Problem of Pain, chapter 3
Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had gotten out of the Author's control.
Miracles, chapter 12
'Die before you die. There is no chance after.'
Till We Have Faces, book 2, chapter 2
The natural life in each of us is something self-centered, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. And especially it wants to be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small. It is afraid of the light and air of the spiritual world, just as people who have been brought up dirty are afraid of a bath. And in a sense it is quite right. It knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centeredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.
Mere Christianity, book 4, chapter 5
Now the disquieting thing is not simply that we skimp and begrudge the duty of prayer. The really disquieting thing is it should have to be numbered among duties at all. For we believe that we were created 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever'. And if the few, the very few, minutes we now spend on intercourse with God are a burden to us rather than a delight, what then?. . . What can be done for—or what should be done with—a rose-tree that dislikes producing roses? Surely it ought to want to?. . .
If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be delight. Some day, please God, it will be. The same is true of many other behaviours which now appear as duties. If I loved my neighbour as myself, most of the actions which are now my moral duty would flow out from me as spontaneously as song from a lark or fragrance from a flower. Why is this not so yet? . . . The very activities for which we were created are, while we live on earth, variously impeded: by evil in ourselves or in others. To practise them spontaneously and delightfully is not yet possible. This situation creates the category of duty, the whole specifically moral realm. . .
I must say my prayers to-day whether I feel devout or not; but that is only as I must learn my grammar if I am ever to read the poets.
Letters to Malcolm, chapter 25
A sin once repented and forgiven, is gone, annihilated, burnt up in the fire of Divine Love, white as snow. There is no harm in continuing to 'bewail' it, i.e. to express one's sorrow, but not to ask for pardon, for that you have already—one's sorrow for being that sort of person.
Letters (8 January 1952)
There are, no doubt, passages in the New Testament which may seem at first sight to promise an invariable granting of our prayers. But that cannot be what they really mean. For in the very heart of the story we meet a glaring instance to the contrary. In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not. After that the idea that prayer is recommended to us as a sort of infallible gimmick may be dismissed. . .
Invariable 'success' in prayer would not prove the Christian doctrine at all. It would prove something much more like magic—a power in certain human beings to control, or compel, the course of nature.
The World's Last Night, chapter 1
Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers and butchers; or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to co-operate in the execution of His Will. 'God,' said Pascal, 'instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of causality.'. . .
He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures.
The World's Last Night, chapter 1
Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends; that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.
Mere Christianity, book 2, chapter 2
Though we struggle against things because we are afraid of them, it is often the other way round—we get afraid because we struggle.
Unpublished letter (17 June 1963)
I am inclined to think a Christian would be wise to avoid, where he decently can, any meeting with people who are bullies, lascivious, cruel, dishonest, spiteful and so forth.
Not because we are 'too good' for them. In a sense because we are not good enough. We are not good enough to cope with all the temptations, nor clever enough to cope with all the problems which an evening spent in such society produces. The temptation is to condone, to connive at; by our words, looks and laughter, to 'consent'.
Reflections on the Psalms, chapter 7
Pray for me; I am suffering incessant temptations to incharitable thoughts at present; one of those black moods in which nearly all one's friends seem to be selfish or even false. And how terrible that there should be even a kind of pleasure in thinking evil.
Letters (12 January 1950)
One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.
Mere Christianity, book 3, chapter 2
And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments [of our past experience] which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are content to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope by fondling and sniffing, to get last year's blooms, and you will get nothing. 'Unless a seed die. . .'
Letters to Malcolm, chapter 5
I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self-knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.
Letters to Malcolm, chapter 6
'It is the same with all their machines. Their labour-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent; their amusements bore them; their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving time have banished leisure from their country.'
The Pilgrim's Regress, book 10, chapter 6
The Existentialist feels Angst because he thinks that man's nature (and therefore his relation to all things) has to be created or invented, without guidance, at each moment of decision. Spenser thought that man's nature was given, discoverable, and discovered; he did not feel Angst. He was often sad: but not, at bottom, worried.
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, book 3, chapter 1
His education had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer's boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, every to use such words as 'man' or 'woman'. He preferred to write about 'vocational groups', 'elements', 'classes' and 'populations': for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.
That Hideous Strength, chapter 4
Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which we are brow-beaten into 'appreciating', are not good work because they are not work at all. They are mere puddles of spilled sensibility or reflection. When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing taste, interests, and capacity of his audience. These, no less than the language,the marble, or the paint, are part of his raw material; to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored or defiled. Haughty indifference to them is not genius nor integrity; it is laziness and incompetence.
The World's Last Night, chapter 5
The value we have given to that word ['Puritanism'] is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years? By it we [devils] rescue annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity, and sobriety of life.
The Screwtape Letters, chapter 10
“Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.” -- C.S. Lewis
“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
"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)
"When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy."
-- C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)
"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." -- 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)
"Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it."
-- C.S. Lewis (The World's Last Night)
"Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is..."
-- C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
"Nothing is yet in its true form." -- C.S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces)
"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)
"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from." -- C.S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces)
"'You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,'" said the Lion."
-- C.S. Lewis (The Silver Chair)
"Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self..." -- C.S. Lewis (Mere 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)
"'We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge--the last thing we know before things become too swift for us.'"-- C.S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet)
"And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies' plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger."-- C.S. Lewis (The Last Battle)
"Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger."-- C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)
"Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect." -- C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
“They have an engine called the Press whereby the people are deceived.” -- C.S. Lewis (That Hideous Strength)
“The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.” -- C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one."
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.
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.
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
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.
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.
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.
"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art . . . it has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival.
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you can't see something that's above you.
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.
"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."
From: On Forgiveness
"A perfect man would never act from sense of duty; he'd always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits, etc.) can do the journey on their own."
-- Letters of C.S. Lewis (18 July 1957), p. 276
"So with us. 'We know not what we shall be' but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun."
-- C.S. Lewis [I need to find the reference for this]
"What we practise, not (save at rare intervals) what we preach, is usually our great contribution to the conversion of others."
-- Letters of C.S. Lewis (2 February 1955), p. 261
"A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility."
-- Christian Reflections, "Christianity and Culture" (1940), para. 4, p. 14
"Perhaps civilization will never be safe until we care for something else more than we care for it."
-- God in the Dock, "First and Second Things" (1942), para. 10, p. 281
"If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed."
-- Mere Christianity, bk. III, chap. 8, para. 14, p. 114
"A God who did not regard this [our own worst sins] with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being. We cannot even wish for such a God -- it is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abolished, that smell of hay or roses or the sea should never again delight any creature, because our own breath happens to stink."
-- The Problem of Pain, chap. 4, para. 5, p. 58
"A bad book is to be deemed a real evil in so far as it can be shown to prompt to sensuality, or pride, or murder, or to conflict with the doctrine of Divine Providence, or the like. The other dyslogistic terms dear to critics (vulgar, derivative, cheap, precious, academic, affected, bourgeois, Victorian, Georgian, 'literary,' etc.) had better be kept strictly on the taste side of the account. In discovering what attitudes are present you can be as subtle as you like. But in your theological and ethical condemnation (as distinct from your dislike of the taste) you had better be very un-subtle. You had better reserve it for plain mortal sins, and plain atheism and heresy. For our passions are always urging us in the opposite direction, and if we are not careful criticism may become a mere excuse for taking revenge on books whose smell we dislike by erecting our temperamental antipathies into pseudo-moral judgements."
-- Christian Reflections, "Christianity and Culture" (1940), section III, para. 8, p. 31
"Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them."
-- The World's Last Night and Other Essays, "The Efficacy of Prayer" (1959), para. 7, p. 5
"To study the past does indeed liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own market-place. But I think it liberates us from the past too. I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians."
-- Selected Literary Essays, "De Descriptione Temporum" (1955), para. 21, p. 12
"It's not a question of God 'sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud. The matter is serious: let us put ourselves in His hands at once -- this very day, this hour."
-- God in the Dock, "'The Trouble with "X"...'" (1948), para. 10, p. 155
"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside."
-- The Problem of Pain, chap. 8, para. 11, p. 127
"'How can they choose it [hell]?'
'Milton was right,' said my Teacher. 'The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy -- that is, to reality. We see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends.'"
-- The Great Divorce, chap. 9, pp. 69-70
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world."
-- Mere Christianity, bk. III, chap. 10, para. 5, p. 120
"If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell."
-- The Great Divorce, Preface, para. 2, p. 6
"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."
-- Mere Christianity, bk. IV, chap. 7, para. 9, p. 163
"The safest road to Hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."
-- The Screwtape Letters, XII
It may be possible for each of us to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden, of my neighbour's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship -- or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people.
... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), "The Weight of Glory"
"What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You can take any number of wrong turnings, but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it."
-- C. S. Lewis "Surprised by Joy."
"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible."
-- C. S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"
"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously -- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment."
-- C. S. Lewis "The Weight of Glory"
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
There’s never a holiday in the spiritual realm...nothing but the full armor of God will ever suffice us in this terrible conflict in which we are engaged. There is no protection...against this wily, subtle, powerful enemy but the full armor of God himself. — C. S. Lewis
Free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give [creatures] free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. — C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of...defeat. What you call defeat, I call miracle: for to make things which are not Itself and thus to become...capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity. — C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
The happiness God desires for His creatures is...ecstasy of love...And for that they must be free. — C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel....Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. — C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
The better stuff a creature is made of—the cleverer and stronger and freer it is—then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. — C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. — C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
"The greatest evil is done not in sordid dens of crime, or even in concentration camps. In those we see its final results. But it is conceived and ordered . . . in clean . . . warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars . . . who do not need to raise their voices." C.S. Lewis
"When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place."--C.S. Lewis ,letter: 3 Aug 19
"We-or at least I-shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasion if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest." -Letters to Malcom
"Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives." -That Hideous Strength
"Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about man's search for God. To me ..they might as well have talked about the mouse's search for the cat". -Surprised by Joy
"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." -The Weight of Glory
"Because God created the Natural-invented it out of His love and artistry-it demands our reverence." -God in the Dock
"No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good." -Mere Christianity
"Never, never pin your whole faith on a human being...there are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it." -Mere Christianity
"Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods." - To Arthur Greeves
"All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or another of destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another...there are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal. It is with immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit- immortal horrors or everlasting splendors." -The Weight of Glory
"The filth that our poor, muddled, sincere, resentful enemies fling at the Holy One, either does not stick, or, sticking, turns into glory." -God in the Dock
"When we merely say that we are bad, the wrath of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God's goodness." -The Problem of Pain
"If I find myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." -Mere Christianity
"The doors of hell are locked on the inside." -The Problem of Pain
"All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be." -The Screwtape Letters
"The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God." -Mere Christianity
"Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life." -Letters of C.S. Lewis
"The best is perhaps what we understand least." -A Grief Observed
The Cruelest Silence
"Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be--or so it feels--welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?"
The Eternally Unique Self
"Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you--you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction.... God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it--made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand."
The Truth Is in the Details
"Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don't work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there are no conversations that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence. In the story of the women taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it in simply because he had seen it.
"Then we come to the strangest story of all, the story of the Resurrection. It is very necessary to get the story clear. I heard a man say, 'The importance of the Resurrection is that it gives evidence of survival, evidence that the human personality survives death.' On that view what happened to Christ would be what had always happened to all men, the difference being that in Christ's case we are privileged to see it happening. This is certainly not what the earliest Christian writers thought. Something perfectly new in the history of the Universe had happened. Christ had defeated death. The door which had always been locked had for the very first time been forced open. This is something quite distinct from mere ghost-survival. I don't mean that they disbelieved in ghost-survival. On the contrary, they believed in it so firmly that, on more than one occasion, Christ had had to assure them that He was not a ghost. The point is that while believing in survival they yet regarded the Resurrection as something totally different and new. The Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in the Universe. Something new has appeared in the Universe: as new as the first coming of organic life. This Man, after death, does not get divided into 'ghost' and 'corpse.' A new mode of being has arisen. That is the story. What are we going to make of it?
An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons -- marriage, or meat, or beer, or cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning. C S Lewis, Mere Christianity
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
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
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.
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
“Mere Christianity”
Power Quote: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
“The Screwtape Letters”
Power Quote: My Dear Wormwood...... In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face. To keep this game up you and Glubose must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: ‘I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper.’ Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken........... Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.
“A Grief Observed”
Power Quote: No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
“The Problem of Pain”
Power Quote: ‘If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.’ This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form. The possibility of answering it depends on showing that the terms ‘good’ and ‘almighty’, and perhaps also the term ‘happy’, are equivocal: for it must be admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words are the best, or the only possible, meanings, then the argument is unanswerable. In this chapter I shall make some comments on the idea of Omnipotence, and, in the following, some on the idea of Goodness.
“Miracles”
Power Quote: If immediate experience cannot prove or disprove the miraculous, still less can history do so. Many people think one can decide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining the evidence ‘according to the ordinary rules of historical inquiry’. But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are. For if they are impossible, then no amount of historical evidence will convince us. If they are possible but immensely improbable, then only mathematically demonstrative evidence will convince us: and since history never provides that degree of evidence for any event, history can never convince us that a miracle occurred. If, on the other hand, miracles are not intrinsically improbable, then the existing evidence will be sufficient to convince us that quite a number of miracles have occurred. The result of our historical enquiries thus depends on the philosophical views which we have been holding before we even began to look at the evidence. This philosophical question must therefore come first.
“The Great Divorce”
Power Quote: “And you’ve lived -- er -- down there -- in the Town -- for some time?’
‘In what they call Hell? Yes. It’s a flop too. They lead you to expect red fire and devils and all sorts of interesting people sizzling on grids -- Henry VIII and all that -- but when you get there it’s just like any other town.’
“I prefer it up here,’ said I.
‘Well, I don’t see what all the talk is about,’ said the Hard-Bitten Ghost. ‘It’s as good as any other park to look at, and darned uncomfortable.’
‘There seems to be some idea that if one stays here one would get -- well, solider -- grow acclimatised.’
‘I know all about that,’ said the Ghost. ‘Same old lie. People have been telling me that sort of thing all my life. They told me in the nursery that if I were good I’d be happy. And they told me at school that Latin would get easier as I went on. After I’d been married a month some fool was telling me that there were always difficulties at first, but with Tact and Patience I’d soon “settle down’ and like it!’
A little lie is like a little pregnancy; It doesn't take long before everyone knows. (C.S. Lewis)
"The demands of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven."
. . .
"Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it; or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye'll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch the sophistry or ye'll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe."
(Source: The Great Divorce, C. S.
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