“The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them.”
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C.S. Lewis
“I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Edmund, give a special goodbye to Trumpkin for me. He's been a brick.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Extraordinary things only happen to extraordinary people. Maybe it's a sign that you've got an extraordinary destiny--something greater than you could've imagined.”
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C.S. Lewis
“He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you're making.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
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C.S. Lewis
“What do they teach them at these schools?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I see you are an idiot, whatever else you may be...”
―
C.S. Lewis
“And that is enough to raise your thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride… Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone. ”
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C.S. Lewis
“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.”
―
C.S. Lewis
