“But as long as you know you're nobody special, you'll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Well,' said Ransom, 'if it is a delusion, it's a pretty stubborn one.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn’t yet, or used to be Human once and isn’t now, or ought to be Human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents--the
accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's. But if their thoughts--i.e. of materialism and astronomy--are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It's like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Nor am I greatly moved by jocular inquiries such as, 'Where will you put all the mosquitoes?' -- a question to be answered on its own level by pointing out that, if the worst came to worst, a heaven for mosquitoes and a hell for men could very conveniently be combined.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Thomas Aquinas said of suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself; but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances. That is to say, if evil is present, pain at recognition of the evil, being a kind of knowledge, is relatively good.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.”
―
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
“The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths--but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.”
―
C.S. Lewis
