“And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Don't shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see Him.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“...Aslan didn't tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he's up, I shouldn't wonder. But that doesn't let us off following the signs.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity”
―
C.S. Lewis
“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
“Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.”
―
C.S. Lewis
