“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
“All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!" Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.”
―
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
“In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You do not see as quite as well as you think.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people”
―
C.S. Lewis
“This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we--even our poets and musicians and inventors--never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials to build from. All we can know about the act of creation must be derived from what we can gather about the relation of the creatures to their Creator”
―
C.S. Lewis
“At least he went on saying this till Aslan had loaded him up with three dwarfs, one dryad, two rabbits, and a hedgehog, that steadied him a bit.”
―
C.S. Lewis
