“Wouldn't he know without being asked?' said Polly.
'I've no doubt he would,' said the Horse (still with his mouth full). 'But I've a sort of an idea he likes to be asked.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator. When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest t all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen it long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity that he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton has more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete -- Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire -- all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called "tinny". It wasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Christ says, "Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good...Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked--the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Look for the valleys, the green places, and fly through them. There will always be a way through.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Of Course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is)... Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You can't know, you can only believe - or not.”
―
C.S. Lewis
