“You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“They stormed and jeered at one another in long meaningless words of about twenty syllables each.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Got to start by finding it, have we? Can't start by looking for it, I suppose?”
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C.S. Lewis
“If the world is meaningless, then so are we; if we mean something, we do not mean alone.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!”
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C.S. Lewis
“Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”
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C.S. Lewis
“My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else.
Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.”
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C.S. Lewis
“For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“[E]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state of the other.”
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C.S. Lewis
“You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.”
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C.S. Lewis
“When Aslan Bears his teeth winter meets its death. When he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. IT is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is he who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.”
―
C.S. Lewis
