“Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.
Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love --a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.
For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I was not born to be free---I was born to adore and obey.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Humour is...the all-consoling and...the all-excusing, grace of life.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“No people find each other more absurd than lovers”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Yes,” said the Lord Digory, “Its inside is bigger than its outside.”
“Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”
―
C.S. Lewis
