“I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You all know," said the Guide, "that security is mortals' greatest enemy.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“It has actually become very necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!”
―
C.S. Lewis
“When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason. Ho, my beauties!”
―
C.S. Lewis
“By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“you had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself...I see with a myriad of eyes,but it is still I who see.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Man is to be understood only in his relation to God.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.”
―
C.S. Lewis
