“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.”
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C.S. Lewis
“That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.”
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C.S. Lewis
“if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
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C.S. Lewis
“I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”
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C.S. Lewis
“If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man's outward actions – if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before – then I think we must suspect that his 'conversion' was largely imaginary; and after one's original conversion, every time one thinks one has made an advance, that is the test to apply. Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in 'religion' mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better; just as in an illness 'feeling better' is not much good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up. In that sense the outer world is quite right to judge Christianity by its results. Christ told us to judge by results. A tree is known by its fruit; or, as we say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world. The war-time posters told us that Careless Talk costs Lives. It is equally true that Careless Lives cost Talk. Our careless lives set the outer world taking; and we give them grounds for talking in a way that throws doubt on the truth of Christianity itself.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But if you are a poor creature--poisoned by a wretched up-bringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels--saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion--nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends--do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day He will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all - not least yourself.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“This is our dilemma--either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste--or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.”
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C.S. Lewis
“I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?”
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C.S. Lewis
“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
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C.S. Lewis
“If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?”
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C.S. Lewis
“If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.”
―
C.S. Lewis
