“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, the only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity”
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C.S. Lewis
“If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.'
A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”
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C.S. Lewis
“A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”
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C.S. Lewis
“It was too perfect to last,' so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic - as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it ('None of that here!'). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean 'This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.' As if God said, 'Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart”
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C.S. Lewis
“And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Aslan: You doubt your value. Don't run from who you are.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s (God’s) ground…He [God] made the pleasure: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He [God] has forbidden. ”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But when your sword breaks, you draw your dagger.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”
―
C.S. Lewis
