“We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he "wants a woman". Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude for her five minutes after fruition.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now. Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith?”
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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
“Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Has not one of the poets said that a noble friend is the best gift and a noble enemy the next best?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“And there we all were, as invisible as you could wish to see.”
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C.S. Lewis
“I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. He whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?”
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C.S. Lewis
“Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.”
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C.S. Lewis
“An odd by-product of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.”
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C.S. Lewis
“One always feel better when one has made up one's mind.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The best is perhaps what we understand the least.”
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C.S. Lewis
“If God 'foresaw' our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose god is outside and above the Time-line... You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He know your tomorrow's actions in just the same way--because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but the moment at which you have done it is already 'NOW' for Him.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You all know," said the Guide, "that security is mortals' greatest enemy.”
―
C.S. Lewis
