“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)...”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.
If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the ris-
ing generation. I am an oldster myself and might be
expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have
been far more impressed by the bad manners of par-
ents to children than by those of children to parents.
Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family
meals where the father or mother treated their
grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered
to any other young people, would simply have termi-
nated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on mat-
ters which the children understand and their elders
don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions,
ridicule of things the young take seriously some-
times of their religion insulting references to their
friends, all provide an easy answer to the question
"Why are they always out? Why do they like every
house better than their home?" Who does not prefer
civility to barbarism?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Milton was right,’ said my Teacher. ‘The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that's new to him.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“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