“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.”
―
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
“Lead us not into temptation' often means, among other things, 'Deny me those gratifying invitations, those highly interesting contacts, that participation in the brilliant movements of our age, which I so often, at such risk, desire.'
Reflections on the Psalms, ch 7”
―
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
“You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it... Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.”
―
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
“Something of God... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“...a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”
―
C.S. Lewis
