“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort. Now a clearly maintained distinction between what the Faith actually says and what you would like it to have said or what you understand or what you personally find helpful or think probable, forces your audience to realize that you are tied to your data just as the scientist is tied by the results of the experiments; that you are not just saying what you like. This immediately helps them realize that what is being discussed is a question about objective fact — not gas about ideals and points of view.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“There are no real personalities apart from God. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most 'natural' men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerers have been; how gloriously different are the saints.
But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away 'blindly' so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality; but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him...Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I'm a beast, I am, and a Badger what's more. We don't change. We hold on.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Girls aren't very good at keeping maps in their brains", said Edmund, "That's because we've got something in them", replied Lucy.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You die and you die and then you are beyond death.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located
will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,and what came through them was longing.
These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we
really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshippers.
For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.”
―
C.S. Lewis
