“If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, "hullo! i'm growing up." It is only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“but who can feel ugly, when their heart feels joy”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“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
“Life isn't all fricasseed frogs and eel pie.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I sometimes wonder if all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism - for that is what the words 'one flesh' would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact - just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument.”
―
C.S. Lewis
