“Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires - one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The death of a beloved is an amputation.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We are not living in a world where all roads are radii if a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“If things are real, they're there all the time.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“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
“I, or any mortal at any time, may be utterly mistaken as to the situation he is really in.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.”
―
C.S. Lewis
