“If you run now, without a moment's rest, you will still be in time to warn King Lune."
Shasta's heart fainted at these words for he felt he had no strength left. And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one. But all he said out loud was:
"Where is the King?"
The Hermit turned and pointed with his staff. "Look," he said. "There is another gate, right opposite to the one you entered by. Open it and go straight ahead: always straight ahead, over level or steep, over smooth or rough, over dry or wet. I know by my art that you will find King Lune straight ahead. But run, run: always run.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you're making.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The laws of the universe are never broken. Your mistake is to think that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unbreakable laws; whereas they are only the remote results which the true laws bring about more often than not; as a kind of accident.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“They stormed and jeered at one another in long meaningless words of about twenty syllables each.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds' wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Narnia! It's all in the wardrobe just like I told you!”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But what manner of use would it be ploughing through that darkness?' asked Drinian.
Use?' replied Reepicheep. 'Use, Captain?' If you mean by filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventures. And here is as great an adventure as I have ever heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“God has infinite attention, infinite leisure to spare for each one of us. He doesn't have to take us in the line. You're as much alone with Him as if you were the only thing He'd ever created.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“And there we all were, as invisible as you could wish to see.”
―
C.S. Lewis