“Edmund, give a special goodbye to Trumpkin for me. He's been a brick.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“This was bad grammar of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia--in our world they usually don't talk at all.
- The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe”
―
C.S. Lewis
“All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen it long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity that he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton has more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete -- Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire -- all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called "tinny". It wasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Humour is...the all-consoling and...the all-excusing, grace of life.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“we follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus-not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in his eyes than in ours.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. 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
“Who are you?'
One who has waited long for you to speak.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“All get what they want; they do not always like it.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.”
―
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
“and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career. ”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: Walter Helwich merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull…”
―
C.S. Lewis
