“Your Majesty would have a perfect right to strike off his head," said Peridan. "Such an assault as he made puts him on a level with assassins."
"It is very true," said Edmund. "But even a traitor may mend. I have known one that did." And he looked very thoughtful.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, nor from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. ”
―
C.S. Lewis
“God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The laws of the universe are never broken. Your mistake is to think that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unbreakable laws; whereas they are only the remote results which the true laws bring about more often than not; as a kind of accident.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I daren't come and drink," said Jill.
Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion.
Oh dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer."I suppose I must go and look for another stream then."
There is no other stream," said the Lion.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“If we consider the unblushing promises of reward … promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book which will break your heart."
―
C.S. Lewis
“One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin.”
―
C.S. Lewis
