“[The enemy] has filled His world full of pleasures . . . Everything has to be twisted before it is any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side. (Not that that excuses you...)”
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C.S. Lewis
“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.”
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C.S. Lewis
“And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Well,' said Ransom, 'if it is a delusion, it's a pretty stubborn one.”
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C.S. Lewis
“We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse - so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years!”
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C.S. Lewis
“We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Bereavement is not the truncation of married love,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “but one of its regular phases—like the honeymoon.”
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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.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
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C.S. Lewis
“We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality of whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them. ”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forewarmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.”
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C.S. Lewis
“There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want ‘to spend eternity playing harps’. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”
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C.S. Lewis
“I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.”
―
C.S. Lewis
