“if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I may repeat 'Do as you would be done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God;and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey him.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We forgive, we mortify our resentment; a week later some chain of thought carries us back to the original offence and we discover the old resentment blazing away as if nothing had been done about it at all. We need to forgive our brother seventy times seven not only for 490 offences but for one offence. ”
―
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
“I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say. ”
―
C.S. Lewis
“That’s true to life.
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or
reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on
thinking about the fact that you suffer.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone. ”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends "You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another." The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.”
―
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
“To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within.”
―
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
“The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.”
―
C.S. Lewis
