“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“One always feel better when one has made up one's mind.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Aslan's instructions always work; there are no exceptions.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“They stormed and jeered at one another in long meaningless words of about twenty syllables each.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Joy is the serious business of heaven.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“She remembered, as every sensible person does, that you should never never shut yourself up in a wardrobe.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was -- gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear”
―
C.S. Lewis
