“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don't we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive -- who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture -- almost the précis -- we've made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that the mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' 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? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“until the theologians and the ordained clergy begin to communicate with ordinary people in the vernacular, in a way that they can understand, I’m going to have to do this sort of thing.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I have said that she had no face; but that meant she had a thousand faces”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“One must face the fact that all the talk about His
love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda,
but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of
Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has
absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food;
(2) He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are
empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has
drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“you had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job--where the machine seems to run on much as usual--I loath the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“To the glistening eastern sea, I give you Queen Lucy the Valiant. To the great western woods, King Edmund the Just. To the radiant southern sun, Queen Susan the Gentle. And to the clear northern skies, I give you King Peter the Magnificent. Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia. May your wisdom grace us until the stars rain down from the heavens.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.”
―
C.S. Lewis
