“This is our dilemma--either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste--or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“If the world is meaningless, then so are we; if we mean something, we do not mean alone.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“And there's one thing about this underground work, we shan't get any rain.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You all know," said the Guide, "that security is mortals' greatest enemy.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh, Adam's son, how cleverly you defend yourself against all that might do you good!”
―
C.S. Lewis
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
―
C.S. Lewis
