“Emeth came walking forward into the open strip of grass between the bonfire and the Stable. His eyes were shining, his face was solemn, his hand was on his sword-hilt, and he carried his head high. Jill felt like crying when she looked at his face. And Jewel whispered in the King’s ear, “By the Lion’s Mane, I almost love this young warrior, Calormene though he be. He is worthy of a better god than Tash.”
— C.S. Lewis
“Love is the great conqueror of lust.”
— C.S. Lewis
“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
— C.S. Lewis
“Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once.”
— C.S. Lewis
“If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.”
— C.S. Lewis
“Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we rceive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best–if you like, it ‘works’ best–when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance.”
— C.S. Lewis
“The author says the mark of a true rest your creature is an inability to be still without a kind of resignation.”
— C.S. Lewis
“… the very last thing I want to do is to unsettle in the mind of any Christian, whatever his denomination, the concepts — for him traditional — by which he finds it profitable to represent to himself what is happening when he receives the bread and wine. I could wish that no definitions had ever been felt to be necessary; and, still more, that none had been allowed to make divisions between churches.”
— C.S. Lewis
“The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.”
— C.S. Lewis
“Tea should be taken in solitude.”
— C.S. Lewis
“Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.”
— C.S. Lewis
“The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under.”
— C.S. Lewis
“I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.”
— C.S. Lewis
“You see, I don’t think age matters so much as people think. Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts were already 50 when I was 12….”
— C.S. Lewis
“I suspect there is something in our very mode of thought which makes it inevitable that we should always be baffled by actual existence, whatever character actual existence may have.”
— C.S. Lewis
“No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”
— C.S. Lewis
“We love and reason because God Loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.”
— C.S. Lewis
“Your trouble has been what old poets call Daungier. We call it Pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing-the gold lion, the bearded bull—which breaks through hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness. . . . The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.”
— C.S. Lewis
“Although he didn’t care much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks (grades or comparisons).”
— C.S. Lewis
“… A man is not usually called upon to have an opinion of his own talents at all, since he can very well go on improving them to the best of his ability without deciding on his own precise niche in the temple of Fame… [Man] did not create themselves… their talents were given them, and they might as well be proud of the colour of their hair.”
— C.S. Lewis
“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”
— C.S. Lewis
“It is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, ‘You must do this. I can’t.”
— C.S. Lewis
“You can make anything by writing”
— C.S. Lewis
“Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”
— C.S. Lewis
“I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there’s any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.”
— C.S. Lewis
“I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began”
— C.S. Lewis
“When you painted on earth – at least in your earlier days – it was because you caught glimpses of heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too.”
— C.S. Lewis
“If you read history you will find that the Christians begin the most for the present world are just the ones that thought the most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot. in the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark one Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so in effective in this. And that Heaven and you’ll get the earth “thrown in”: aim at earth and you’ll get neither.”
— C.S. Lewis
“We are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that the mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man’s love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.”
— C.S. Lewis
“It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. … “It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit. … Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
— C.S. Lewis