“Thomas Aquinas said of suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself; but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances. That is to say, if evil is present, pain at recognition of the evil, being a kind of knowledge, is relatively good.”
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C.S. Lewis
“If you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ's body...every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who along can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be a odd way of getting him to do more work.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Be thou glad sleeper and thy sorrow offcast. I am the gate to all good adventure.”
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C.S. Lewis
“In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.”
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C.S. Lewis
“In the name of the Fathers, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes-I mean Amen.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.”
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C.S. Lewis
“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin... The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes, or Pagans, a sense of guilt. (That this was common among Pagans is shown by the fact that both Epicureanism and the mystery religions both claimed, though in different ways, to assuage it.) Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man, the roles are quite reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge; if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God is in the dock.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan.”
―
C.S. Lewis
