“You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back--if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out...”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, "hullo! i'm growing up." It is only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I felt ashamed."
"But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?"
"No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal -- of being a mortal."
"But how could you help that?"
"Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker's, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Don't be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you've been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I haven't seen it myself. I couldn't prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority -because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.”
―
C.S. Lewis
