“Many things--such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly--are done worst when we try hardest to do them.”
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C.S. Lewis
“And I was the Lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Are the gods not just?"
"Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' --or else not.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else. That can come later, if it must come at all. (And notice here how the true training for anything whatever that is good always prefigures and, if submitted to, will always help us in, the true training for the Christian life)”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it if you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking-glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different - deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.”
―
C.S. Lewis