“Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book which will break your heart."
―
C.S. Lewis
“No people find each other more absurd than lovers”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Nothing is wonderful except in the abnormal, and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions 'on the further shore,' pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There's not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn't be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the Spiritualists bait their hook! 'Things on this side are not so different after all.' There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Falling in love is something that happens to us, being is love is something we do. No passion is self preservatory.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness; but your darkness cannot now infect our light.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“If things are real, they're there all the time.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Last year, when he had been staying with the Pevensies, he had managed to hear them all talking of Narnia and he loved teasing them about it. He thought of course that they were making it all up; and as he was far too stupid to make anything up himself, he did not approve of that.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved.”
―
C.S. Lewis
