C. S. Lewis (quotes) - Wisdom Trove

Do not dare not to dare.
For Narnia and for Aslan!
Further up and further in!
Miracles are for beginners.
To love is to be vulnerable.
If you thirst you may drink.
Am I lost or just less found?
We are what we believe we are.
The absent are easily refuted.
Hail Lord, …Loose my chains.
I don’t want to hold your hand!
Humility is self-forgetfulness.
I want God, not my idea of God.
Every joy is beyond all others.
You people have no imagination!
You cannot make men good by law.
Tea should be taken in solitude.
Nothing is yet in its true form.
Man must endure his going hence.
Why should your heart not dance?
Obedience is the road to freedom.
This moment contains all moments.
We read to know we are not alone.
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
You can make anything by writing.
Hatred obscures all distinctions.
Please will you do my job for me.
Freedom always comes with a price.
They Open A Door And Enter A World
Always winter but never Christmas.
Forgiveness does not mean excusing.
In our adversity, God shouts to us.
Selfishness has never been admired.
I pray because I can’t help myself.
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
Imagine yourself as a living house.
Love is the great conqueror of lust.
Christianity is a fighting religion.
Prosperity knits a man to the world.
Why must holy places be dark places?
I am a product […of] endless books.
A myth is a lie that conveys a truth.
Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will
Joy is the serious business of heaven.
In worship, God imparts himself to us.
You Too? I thought I was the only one.
Come, live with me and you’ll know me.
We must get over wanting to be needed.
Human intellect is incurably abstract.
I came alive when I started loving you.
Things never happen the same way twice.
We meet no ordinary people in our lives.
Friends are seldom found; they are made.
The death of a beloved is an amputation.
Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.
Even I never dreamed of Magic like this!
Anger is the fluid love bleeds when cut.
It is always the novice who exaggerates.
Autumn is really the best of the seasons
This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!
Nothing is really ours until we share it.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
Suspicion often creates what it suspects.
Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears.
Laziness means more work in the long run.
What do they teach them at these schools?
I am in love and out of it I will not go.
Here at last is the thing I was made for.
Ink is the great cure for all human ills.
I desired dragons with a profound desire.
If you have a religion it must be cosmic.
Gone! …And you and I quite crestfallen.
Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
Prayer does not change God; it changes me.
I was with book, as a woman is with child.
God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous
He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.
An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.
Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.
Obedience is the key that opens every door.
Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.
The Opposite of Love is not hate, but power
No one can teach riding so well as a horse.
The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.
Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!
Jesus was either a Liar, a Lunatic, or Lord
There seems no plan because it is all plan.
Only real risk passes the reality of faith.
Delight is incomplete until it is expressed.
Life isn’t all fricasseed frogs and eel pie.
I will not be at the mercy of the telephone!
It’s always winter but it’s never Christmas.
Mercy detached from justice grows unmerciful.
Die before you die, there is no chance after.
Thirst was made for water. Inquiry for truth.
The doors of hell are locked from the inside!
I do not expect old heads on young shoulders.
Total war is the most humane in the long run.
Things always work according to their nature.
Pain is G-d’s megaphone to wake up the world.
Enemy occupied territory is what the world is.
As long as you are proud, you cannot know God.
Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.
The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.
The only people who hate escapism are jailers.
Earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy.
The longest way round is the shortest way home
You die and die and then you are beyond death.
Love is more than an emotion, it is a decision.
God wants a child’s heart and a grownup’s head.
Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.
The man in Christ rose again, not only the God.
Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.
If things are real, they’re there all the time.
I prefer being honest to being ‘honest to God.’
Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is
Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.
Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
To walk out of his will is to walk into nowhere.
History is a story written by the finger of God.
They did nothing wrong their time here has ended
It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.
Before we can be cured, we must want to be cured.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
No people find each other more absurd than lovers
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest.
It is better to forget about yourself altogether.
but who can feel ugly, when their heart feels joy
I see you are an idiot, whatever else you may be.
For jokes as well as justice come in with speech.
In such a fearful world, we need a fearless church
Disobedience to conscience makes conscience blind.
If there is equality it is in His love, not in us.
Much is expected from those to whom much is given.
Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.
Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.
[Something] does not rise to the dignity of error.
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.
Our problem with desire is that we want too little.
All get what they want; they do not always like it.
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
God is not an optional extra, He’s an absolute must!
The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.
It is often little things that are hardest to stand.
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.
Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue.
Well, whatever they say, you don’t feel like ghosts.
God is the food our spirits were designed to feed on.
Everything is as good or bad as our opinion makes it.
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.
Where, except in the present, can the eternal be met?
Man does not have a soul. He is a soul. He has a body.
Above all else , the devil can not stand to be mocked.
God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain.
If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.
If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.
We have to be continually reminded of what we believe.
We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin.
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress.
When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over
Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is.
Narnia! It’s all in the wardrobe just like I told you!
Never exaggerate. Never say more than you really mean.
God doesn’t want something from us. He simply wants us.
You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us.
To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator.
One always feel better when one has made up one’s mind.
All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.
Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.
Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said.
All names will soon be restored to their proper owners.
On the back of Satan’s neck is a nail scarred footprint.
Everything that is not eternal is worthless in eternity.
Love is unselfishly choosing for another’s highest good.
We are not meant to be perpetually solemn: We must play.
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.
Man is to be understood only in his relationship to God.
You can give the Devil too much or too little attention.
The harder you tried not to think, the more you thought.
To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man.
Pleasure that is its own pursuit is always bad pleasure.
Aslan: You doubt your value. Don’t run from who you are.
And the Prince stared at her like a man out of his wits.
Peter, High King of Narnia,” said Aslan. “Shut the Door.
I was not born to be free—I was born to adore and obey.
Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar.
We only learn to behave ourselves in the presence of God.
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
Read and Re-Read–“Re-reading, we always find a new book.
‘Useful,’ and ‘necessity’ was always ‘the tyrant’s plea’.
Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.
Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.
Our problem is not that we desire too much but too little.
You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.
We know nothing of religion here: we only think of Christ.
Aslan’s instructions always work; there are no exceptions.
It matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth.
Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us.
When we are wholly His we will be more ourselves than ever.
Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair.
Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.
Length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery.
We are all fallen creatures and all very hard to live with.
Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one.
I have often repented of speech but hardly ever of silence.
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.
Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?
Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?
Golly,’ said Edmund under his breath, ‘He’s a retired star.
Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.
And men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
‚ÄúWho are you?‚Äù One who has waited long for you to speak.
Watchin’ and listenin’ is the thing at present; not talking.
He produced mainly three results: Hatred, Terror, Adoration.
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
Once the feet are put right, all the rest of him will follow.
We know we are sinners, it does not follow that we are saved.
Ah, you’ve come over the water. Powerful wet stuff, ain’t it?
You can’t really study people; you can only get to know them.
The right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge.
Sexual appetite, like any other appetite, grows by indulgence
And there we all were, as invisible as you could wish to see.
In your world, I have another name. You should know me by it.
And this is the marvel of marvels; that he called me Beloved.
Christ wants us to have a child’s heart but a grown-up’s head.
We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We happen to have a body.
It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?
Giving to the poor is an essential part of Christian morality.
I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself.
A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food.
The longer we stay in Hell, the more we become attached to it.
This wasn’t a garden,’ said Susan presently. ‘It was a castle.
I object to that remark very strongly! – The Magician’s Nephew
A clever arrangement of bad eggs will never make a good omelet.
You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.
I seemed to hear God saying, “Put down your gun and we’ll talk.
I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love others less.
Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved.
The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ.
To move with the times is, of course, to go where all times go.
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
The lost enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded.
100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.
See the bear in his own den before you judge of his conditions.
Oh, I’m a dangerous criminal, I am,’ said the dwarf cheerfully.
You have no idea what an appetite it gives one, being executed.
There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
Friendship is…the sort of love one can imagine between angels.
You have gone into the Temple…and found Him, as always, there.
Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.
Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.
In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated
We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.
True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.
The devil loves ‘curing’ a small fault by giving you a great one.
The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost.
If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.
A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility.
Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.
The only thing Christianity can not be…is moderately important.
You can’t analyze God. He is too awesome, too big, too mysterious.
Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.
It was not for societies or states, that Christ died, but for men.
One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.
But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan.
Most people don’t need to be taught, they need only to be reminded
Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.
The cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning!
One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself.
An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.
If you haven’t met Satan recently, you are probably going his way!
Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.
A God. The God. One word can make all the difference in the world.
Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest upon reciprocity.
The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
How difficult it is to avoid having a special standard for oneself.
We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.
Is any pleasure on Earth as great as a circle of Christian friends?
My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart.
I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with them.
The more pride we have, the more other people‚Äôs pride irritates us
Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.
Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.
Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease?
No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights.
You must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give.
Humour is…the all-consoling and…the all-excusing, grace of life.
We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may “conquer” them.
You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.
The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’
Virtue – even attempted virtue – brings light; indulgence brings fog.
Homemaking is surely in reality the most important work in the world.
He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand.
Sainthood lies in the habit of referring the smallest actions to God.
Well,’ said Ransom, ‘if it is a delusion, it’s a pretty stubborn one.
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
The ‘frankness’ of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.
Edmund, give a special goodbye to Trumpkin for me. He’s been a brick.
He (God) loved us not because we are lovable, but because He is love.
Life is too deep for words, so don’t try to describe it, just live it.
Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.
I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
My own eyes are not enough for me; I will see through those of others.
No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.
I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.
The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper.
A man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.
Every day in a life fills the whole life with expectations and memory.
The best fruits are plucked for each by some hand that is not his own.
Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.
Until you have given up yourself to Him, you will not have a real self.
The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.
The Christian idea of ‘putting on Christ’ is the whole of Christianity.
You can’t just go on being a good egg. You must either hatch or go bad!
People shouldn’t call for demons unless they really mean what they say.
You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.
No time for better words, no time to unsay anything. -Til We Have Faces
you had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words.
Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.
If we only have the will to walk, then God is pleased with our stumbles.
I don’t pray so that I can change God. I pray so that God can change me.
He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.
A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness.
Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.
It is very true. But even a traitor may mend. I have known one that did.
Besides reasoning about matters of fact, men also make moral judgements.
The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
You must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best
You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
When we are lost in the woods, the sight of a signpost is a great matter.
By repenting, one acknowledges them as sins-therefore not to be repeated.
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.
Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way.
Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.
If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself.
Even if there were pains in Heaven, all who understand would desire them.
I’m a beast, I am, and a Badger what’s more. We don’t change. We hold on.
You all know,” said the Guide, “that security is mortals’ greatest enemy.
Morality or duty never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.
I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.
More like the real thing,’ said the lord Digory softly. – The Last Battle
Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.
Have fun, even if it’s not the same kind of fun everyone else is having.
What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
Nothing in Man is either worse or better for being shared with the beasts.
We were made not primarily that we may love God, but that God may love us.
Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary.
God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.
Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe.
And there’s one thing about this underground work, we shan’t get any rain.
Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.
God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.
Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing.
Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even agony into a glory
If there ever was a time that nothing existed, then nothing would exist now
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.
Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly.
Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear
All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.
If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.
It’s so large” “It’s the world dear, did you think it’d be small?” “smaller
Christianity has not message for those who do not realize they are sinners.
If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.
Our desire is not only to SEE glory, but to participate in the glory we see.
Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people
Christian love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.
Some journeys take us far from home. Some adventures lead us to our destiny.
People who know a lot of the same things can hardly help talking about them.
The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard.
Are the gods not just?’ ‘Oh no, child. What would become us us if they were?
the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.
Feeling like the voice she liked best in all the world was calling her name.
and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.
But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves.
Don’t judge a man by where he is, because you don’t know how far he has come.
God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in
Afflictions are… if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ
Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others.
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that’s new to him.
The present is the only time in which any duty may be done or grace received.
Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning.
The mouse is a fair treat but this one would talk the hind legs off a donkey.
By gum,’ said Digory, ‘Don’t I just wish I was big enough to punch your head!
A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.
A man can’t be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it.
It is a happy moment when our desire crosses with the will of Heavenly Father.
That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
Friends are like coals in a fire – together, they glow; apart, they grow cold.
When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.
Got to start by finding it, have we? Can’t start by looking for it, I suppose?
You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.
We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.
Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.
We come to Scripture not to learn a subject but to steep ourselves in a person.
It takes courage to live through suffering; and it takes honesty to observe it.
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many.
You can’t go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.
We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness.
Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.
In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.
The beauty of life, is that you don’t have to be modernly beautiful to live it.
What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.
There might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung.
The bolt of Tash falls from above!’ ‘Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway?
But however happy you are feeling, you can’t talk with your mouth full of snow.
Precisely because we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments.
Something deep in the human heart breaks at the thought of a life of mediocrity.
When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.
A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all‚Äîand more amusing.
Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.
The surest way of spoiling a pleasure [is] to start examining your satisfaction.
All schools both here and in America should teach far fewer subjects far better.
I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given.
For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.
Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.
Provocation doesn’t make me ill-tempered: it only shows me how ill-tempered I am.
You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” said the Lion.
Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.
A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth.
If ever they remembered their life in this world it was as one remembers a dream.
All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.
The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose.
One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.
The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.
A Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent.
There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.
Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.
If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been a proof that you were not.
I have always at least, ever since I can remember had a kind of longing for death.
Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased.
The true Christian’s nostril is to be continually attentive to the inner cesspool.
A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.
We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.
No man who says, ‘I’m as good as you,’ believes it. He would not say it if he did.
The true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.
You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.
It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men.
The stamp of the Saint is that he can waive his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus.
A little lie is like a little pregnancy it doesn’t take long before everyone knows.
The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.
Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.
A promise must be about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling a certain way.
The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past.
Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours.
The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.
You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.
It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love them.
When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive.
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
There seems to be hardly any one among my acquaintance from whom I have not learned.
Where I come from, they don’t think much of men who are bossed about by their wives.
Be good, sweet maid, and don’t forget that this involves being as clever as you can.
Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.
Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.
You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.
We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely
The value of the individual does not lie in him. He receives it by union with Christ.
Don’t think of God in terms of forms, because forms are limited and God is unlimited.
Once in our world, a Stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.
If God had granted all the silly prayers I’ve made in my life, where should I be now?
We cannot fully understand the relations of time and choice until we are beyond both.
I believe that there are too many practitioners in the church, who are not believers.
So many things–nay every real thing–is good if only it will be humble and ordinate.
True friends… face in the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals.
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary
Though under earth, and throneless now I be Yet while I lived all earth was under me.
Don’t shine so that others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see HIM.
The holier a man becomes, the more he mourns over the unholiness which remains in him.
We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you.
We must get over wanting to be needed-this is the hardest of all temptations to resist
We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge.
It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose him as an alternative to hell.
I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.
Friendship is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.
I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless he sees that it is good for him to wait.
We have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.
For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.
Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.
What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.
People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.
What one must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation.
There is no use saying you chose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up.
The essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends.
A man can’t be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam.
The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.
The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.
Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.
Jesus Christ did not say, ‘Go into the world and tell the world that it is quite right.’
At the end of all things, the blessed will say, ‘We never lived anywhere but in heaven.’
Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description.
No interviews without appointments except between nine and ten p.m. on second Saturdays.
If the world is meaningless, then so are we; if we mean something, we do not mean alone.
In the name of the Fathers, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes-I mean Amen.
That world is ended, as if it had never been. Let the race of Adam and Eve take warning.
But all night, Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes.
Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.
Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.
The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.
We may think God wants actions of a certain kind, but God wants people of a certain kind.
Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.
Very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.
If nothing in this world satisfies me, perhaps it is because I was made for another world.
I have been feeling very much lately that cheerful insecurity is what our Lord asks of us.
Puddleglum’s my name. But it doesn’t matter if you forget it. I can always tell you again.
I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.
…if all we mean by our love is a craving to be loved, we are in a very deplorable state.
When you go to church you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends.
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.
In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.
If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain.
If Christianity is only one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance.
Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting?
For the past twenty years you and I have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became man.
To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?
You weren’t a decent man and you didn’t do your best. We none of us were and none of us did.
If they won’t write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.
Whenever all men are…hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.
For He (God) seems to do nothing of himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures.
Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die.
A sign of a culture that has lost its faith – Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.
We shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want
It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being.
The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.
Your place in Heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it.
All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness.
If He who in Himself can lack nothing, chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.
It is important early in life to acquire the power of reading sense wherever you happen to be.
If one could run without getting tired I don’t think one would often want to do anything else.
Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.
There is someone I accept even though I do not approve of all he does…and that someone is me
The world was made partly that there may be prayer; partly that our prayers might be answered.
If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.
I cannot speak for the way God deals with others; I only know how he deals with me personally.
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.
The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not.
You cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
Many people think their prayers are never answered because it is the answered ones they forget.
It is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.
Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality.
On the whole, God‚Äôs love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him.
Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.
People blush at praise–not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs.
Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask.
Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also.
Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life.
If a man is going to write on chemistry, he learns chemistry. The same is true of Christianity.
Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.
A man whose life has been transformed by Christ cannot help but have his worldview show through.
Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
They stormed and jeered at one another in long meaningless words of about twenty syllables each.
The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.
Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.
A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion.
He who has not forgiven an enemy has never yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.
Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.
Look for the valleys, the green places, and fly through them. There will always be a way through.
if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.
He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants everyone to use what sense they have.
In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes; in the myth it is a fact about improvements.
An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath.
God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
To get even near humility, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.
You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not.
It is not your business to succeed, but to do right. When you have done so the rest lies with god.
In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.
Is there a difference between a man who thinks that honesty is the best policy, and an honest man?
God is love, and that love works through men-especially through the whole community of Christians.
Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.
To be religious is to have one’s attention fixed on God and on one’s neighbour in relation to God.
She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.
I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.
The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story.
A world of automata ‚ of creatures that worked like machines‚ would hardly be worth creating.
The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.
To fight in another man’s armour is something more than to be influenced by his style of fighting.
If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows…then we must starve eternally.
Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.
Not to be, but to seem, virtuous – it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed.
Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.
Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.
You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost or you wouldn’t have come where you now are.
Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.
As image and apprehension are in organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.
Everyone who believes in God at all believes that he knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.
Knock and it shall be opened.’ But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?
The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly nothing.
First be sure that you know exactly what you want to say. Then be sure you have said exactly that.
I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.
The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.
I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death.
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.
I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside of their special subject.
And so for a time it looked as if all the adventures were coming to and end; but that was not to be.
It is in their ‘good’ characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.
Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs
The human mind is generally far more eager to praise or dispraise than it is to describe and define.
Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again.
Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I’m not sure that old age isn’t the best part of life.
Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.
The Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.
Nothing is wonderful except in the abnormal, and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm.
He’s not safe, but he’s good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)
Don’t worry. If you really want to, you will Whether you’ll like it when you do is another question.
Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.
There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.
A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.
We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms.
If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don’t feel at home there?
In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s, we do not accept them easily enough.
That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.” ~ Mere Christianity, By C. S. Lewis
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.
Every poem can be considered in two ways–as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.
Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.
There are no ordinary people.. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.
Child,’ said the Lion, ‘I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.
Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which ‘permits, invites, or compels’ good reading
The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye).
We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage.
It certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.
Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.
Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.
When we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.
Because God created the Natural – invented it out of His love and artistry – it demands our reverence.
The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.
I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. It doesn’t change God – it changes me.
Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
Every contact you make with everyone you meet will help them or hinder them on their journey to heaven.
Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.
The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time.
Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next.
But I remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intensely silent under old great trees
Everywhere, except in theology, there has been a vigorous growth of skepticism about skepticism itself.
Cobbles and kettledrums! …I hope this madness isn’t going to end in a moonlit climb and broken necks.
One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.
Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.
A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.
Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side.
If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.
Other than heaven, the only place where one’s heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell.
Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.
Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him.
We do not come to God as bad people trying to become good people; we come as rebels to lay down our arms.
If we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.
Progress means movement in a desired direction, and we do not all desire the same things for our species.
We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.
Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.
‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.
Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things.
If you never take risks, you’ll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.
He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.
The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.
But Pride always means enmity — it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.
Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.
Joy is the serious business of heaven. Our merriment must be between people who take each other seriously.
Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.
She remembered, as every sensible person does, that you should never never shut yourself up in a wardrobe.
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.
Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.
God, in the end, gives people what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair?
If our deepest desires cannot be satisfied in this world, then we must have been made for another world.
Remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.
We treat our dogs as if they were “almost human”: that is why they really become “almost human” in the end.
We who have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous of our being which we owe to authors.
The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection.
How little people know who think that holiness is dull… When one meets the real thing, it’s irresistible!
As for wrinkles–Pshaw! Why shouldn’t we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.
Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.
One is sometimes glad not to be a great theologian; one might easily mistake it for being a good Christian.
Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices.
Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.
When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only person in the world.
As long as he doesn’t convert it into action, it does not matter how much a man thinks about his repentance.
God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.
One is given strength to bear what happens to one, but not the 100 and 1 different things that might happen.
Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death.
For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
You’ll never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking what sort of impression you make.
I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as much as by anything else
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.
By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.
The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development–
The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author’s mind.
Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this.
Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.
Through pride the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every vice, it’s the complete anti-God state of mind.
There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them.
A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women.
You can‚Äôt get second things by putting them first. You get second things only by putting first things first.
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?-Or at least, “Do you care about the same truth?
I don’t want him to live forever, and I know that he’s not going to live forever whether I want him to or not.
Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.
The prayer preceding all prayers is ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’
Because we love something else more than this world, we love even this world more than those who know no other.
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves part of eternal reality.
Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
Most people spend most of their lives doing neither what they want to be doing nor what they ought to be doing.
I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.
When I’m older I’ll understand” said Lucy, ” I am older and I don’t think I want to understand”, replied Edmund
God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.
Seek Unity and you will find neither Unity nor Truth.Seek the light of truth, and you will find Unity and Truth.
It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.
For the Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work.
[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.
The discomfiture we feel may be our most accurate human sensation; reminding us we are not quite “at home” here.
If you simply try to tell the truth you will, nine times out of ten, be original without ever having noticed it.
You do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but you have lost love because you never attempted obedience.
You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.
You’re a mere chick. I remember you when you were a egg. Don’t come trying to teach me, sir. Crabs and crumpets!
You’ve no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.
You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.
The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.
Regarding the debate about faith and works: It’s like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most important.
I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one.
All joy… emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.
The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.
To play well the scenes in which we are ‘on’ concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
The most deeply compelled action is also the freest action. By that I mean, no part of you is outside the action.
The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
When golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift?
The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.
The New Testament does not envisage solitary religion; regular assembly for worship is everywhere in the epistles.
If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit.
Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.
The longest way round is the shortest way home. (Quoting Alexander MacLaren, The Wearied Christ and Other Sermons)
In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.
In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.
If anyone would like to acquire humility, the first step is to realize one is proud. Nothing can be done before it.
Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
Believe in God like you believe in the sunrise. Not because you can see it, but because you can see all it touches.
It is not enough to want to get rid of one’s sins, we also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins.
The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one!
The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.
If conversion makes no improvements in a man’s outward actions then I think his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary.
Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it.
Falling in love is something that happens to us, being is love is something we do. No passion is self preservatory.
The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event.
One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.
We long for more and God’s promise is that there is more awaiting us. More to delight us than we will ever exhaust.
We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism–the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good.
We have not long to live in any event. Let us spend what is left in seeking the unpeopled world behind the sunrise.
Agnostics talk cheerfully of man’s search for God but they might as well talk about the mouse’s search for the cat.
God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said
Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like.
The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven.
I’d sooner live among people who don’t cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards.
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.
When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.
It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.
The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth– the very thing the whole story has been about.
He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart
When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world
In silence and in meditation on the eternal truths, I hear the voice of God which excites our hearts to greater love.
No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power.
The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him.
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.
Each time you fall He’ll pick you up. He knows your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them.
Isn’t it funny the way some combinations of words can give you–almost apart from their meaning–a thrill like music?
We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.
No more I do, your Majesty. But what’s that got to do with it? I might as well die on a wild goose chase as die here.
If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
The humblest praise most, while cranks & malcontents praise least. Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible
Jesus produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly – are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean ‚ÄúMore people died‚Äù don‚Äôt say ‚ÄúMortality rose.
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?
Now sir, said the bulldog in his business-like way. ‘Are you a animal, vegetable, or mineral?’ – The Magician’s Nephew
It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It’s not the sort of comfort they supply there.
Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.
Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier could give some advice.
The Glory of God, and, as our only means of glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life.
God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other.
Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
We are finite and God will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.
Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved.
As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element.’
Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.
Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.
Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.
The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four.
A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.
For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means… the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.
Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in øreligion æ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.
Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends – comrades – do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed.
Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be ‘given’ in the facts of experience.
You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity.
There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.
You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to ‘know of the doctrine’.
We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.
If you don’t listen to theology, that won’t mean you have no ideas about God, it will mean you have a lot of wrong ones.
Please,’ she said, ‘You’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I’d rather be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.
Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.
God loves us NOT because we’re lovable, because He is love. Not because He needs to receive, because He delights to give.
The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.
Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.
I#pray because the need flows out of me all the time-walking and sleeping. It does not change #‚Äé God – it changes me.
It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.
The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don’t.
God’s love is not wearied by our sins & is relentless in its determination that we be cured at whatever cost to us or Him
Fancy sleeping on air. I wonder if anyone’s done it before. I don’t suppose they have. Oh, bother‚Äî-Scrubb probably has!
All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world; but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.
We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.
Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things.
What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week.
No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.
How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.
Good and evil increase at compound interest. That’s why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance.
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.
I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.
There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.
Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God’s eyes; that is, in our deepest reality.
If we are any good we must always be working towards the moment at which our Pupils are fit to become our Critics & Rivals
Whenever a person dwells chiefly, or even frequently, on the faults of other people’s religions, he is in a bad condition.
When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
Nobody who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any business to talk about ‘misery.’
Forgive us as we forgive- we are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse Gods mercy for ourselves.
If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. It cuts its own throat.
Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self.
Gone! And you and I quite crestfallen. It‚Äôs always like that, you can‚Äôt keep him; it‚Äôs not as if he were a tame lion.
The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.
We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.
All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning…Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.
Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
We do not want to merely ‚Äúsee‚Äù beauty. We want to be united with it, to receive it into ourselves, to become part of it.
It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.
Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. . . youth’s characteristic chronological snobbery.
If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will…then we may take it it is worth paying.
All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.
The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back to the simple principles, which we’re so anxious not to see.
If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.
This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.
Ah, poor Pole. It’s been to much for her, this last bit. Turned her head, I shouldn’t wonder. She’s beginning to see things.
We must show our Christian colors, if we are to be true to Jesus Christ. We cannot remain silent or concede everything away.
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
Christ says, ‘Give me all. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You.’
I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
When you have reached your own room, be kind to those Who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.
We who defend Christianity find ourselves constantly opposed not by the irreligion of our headers but by their real religion.
Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one.
It’s like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.
A spoiled saint, a Pharisee, an inquisitor, or a magician, makes better sport to Hell than a mere common tyrant or debauchee.
Joy bursts in our lives when we go about doing the good at hand and not trying to manipulate things and times to achieve joy.
What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.
What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?
We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.
To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow’s end or the Greek Calends.
Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self–all your wishes and precautions–to Christ.
All these toys were never intended to possess my heart. My true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ.
As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.
In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.
We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.
No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as ‘what a man does with his solitude.’
Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.
When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.
If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.
Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.
You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
If the universe is so bad…how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?
Oh Trees, Trees, Trees…wake. Don’t you remember it? Don’t you remember me? Dryads and hamadryads, come out, come [out] to me.
No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly
I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality. . . asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me.
Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Law Giver.
When the opposite of your prayer occurs, your prayer hasn’t been ignored; it’s been considered & refused for your ultimate good.
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.
If there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most, or else just silly.
To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves… The modern world in comparison, ignores it.
What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.
Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.
You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage but He is building a palace. He intends to come & live in it Himself
The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.
Our temptation is to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers.
The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.
It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.
Girls aren’t very good at keeping maps in their brains”, said Edmund, “That’s because we’ve got something in them”, replied Lucy.
They call him Aslan in That Place,” said Eustace. “What a curious name!” “Not half so curious as himself,” said Eustace solemnly.
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good…Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.
It has actually become very necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.
The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.
When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing.
Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? WEll, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments).
Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.
Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘ God can’.
if anyone present wishes to make me the subject of his wit, I am very much at his service–with my sword–whenever he has leisure.
Jewel,’ he said, ‘what lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
She did not shut it properly because she knew that it is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one.
Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.
Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience.
Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy.
We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.
There is no use in talking as if forgiveness were easy. For we find that the work of forgiveness has to be done over and over again.
Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.
There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself.
In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
Goodness is, so to speak, itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up.
A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid.
If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.
Many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and… God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again
A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.
The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, ‘I am.’ To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him.
If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.
The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.
Remember He is the artist and you are the picture. You can‚Äôt see it, you can’t see your true self. So quietly submit to be painted.
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.
The only thing one can usually change in one’s situation is oneself. And yet one can’t change that either-only ask Our Lord to do so.
Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to believe in a certain way, and can’t really get rid of it.
The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good.
I think we must attack — wherever we meet it — the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true.
What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.
We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men – things at once rational and animal.
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.
The fact that you are giving money to charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not.
I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.
But as long as you know you’re nobody special, you’ll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another.
Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity – like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.
It was a full moon and, shining on all the snow, it made everything almost as bright as day — only the shadows were rather confusing.
A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.
Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time.
We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one’s own.
There is only one way fit for a man – Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.
The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.
No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
Well, sir, if things are real, they‚Äôre there all the time.” “Are they?” said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.
Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book [The Lord of the Rings] which will break your heart.”
Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.
If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.
If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?
And the seriousness with which the other party takes my words always raises the doubt whether I have taken them seriously enough myself.
Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.
The difference [God’s] timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite.
I’m afraid it’s not much use to you, Mr. Rumblebuffin.’ Not at all. Not at all.’ said the giant politely. ‘Never met a nicer hankerchee.
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.’
Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.
The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths–but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.
The promise, made when I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love.
I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.
Holiness is irresistible. If even 10% of the world’s population had it the whole world would be converted and happy before the year’s end.
Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.
I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life’s short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily
Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.
I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.
Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.
Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.
They say, ‘The coward dies many times’; so does the beloved. Didn’t the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?
Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it.
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.
If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic — to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them.
The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.
For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.
Yes, I know,’ interrupted Puddleglum. ‘And few return to the sunlit lands. You needn’t say it again. You are a chap of one idea, aren’t you?
His face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say.
I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?
We are…a Divine work of art, something that God is making…something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.
It is because they have no Oyarsa,’ said one of the pupils. It is because everyone of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,’ said Augray.
It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.
The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must think of God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.
And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.
Which of the religions of the world gives to its followers the greatest happiness? While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is best.
Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally ‚Äì and often far more ‚Äì worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
I have seen landscapes . . . which, under a particular light, make me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.
Sometimes it is hard not to say, ‘God forgive God.’ Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn’t. He crucified Him.
Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.
I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him.
What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’
What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects–with their Christianity latent.
We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or child.
I wish we didn’t live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.
The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.
At least he went on saying this till Aslan had loaded him up with three dwarfs, one dryad, two rabbits, and a hedgehog, that steadied him a bit.
Love as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.
The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred
Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.
Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers.
Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.
Christ did not die for man because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because he is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely.
Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived.
Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.
Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.
And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.
The old field of space, time, matter, and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not.
The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle.
Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult.
The continual looking forward to the eternal world is not a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
Make your choice, adventurous Stranger, Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had.
The higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be.
The man can neither man, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels.
I think it very wrong to pray for people while they are in distress and then not to continue praying, now with thanksgiving, when they are relieved.
Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, “I am what I do.
Aren’t all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?
If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons’ schools, the history of education would be very different.
The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.
We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder.
We need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.
But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.
Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back — to be sucked back — into it?
Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only “liked”: it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.
The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other…
Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my conversion. Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?
You and I who still enjoy fairy tales have less reason to wish actual childhood back. We have kept its pleasures and added some grown-up ones as well.
If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, also we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for another world.
This is my password,” said the King as he drew his sword. “The light is dawning, the lie broken. Now guard thee, miscreant, for I am Tirian of Narnia.
The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.
This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only ‘mouth honour’ and that decreasingly.
And what about you? You must be some kind of beardless dwarf?…You mean to say, that you’re a daughter of Eve?…Y-yes, but, you are in fact… human?
I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate if they do, and if they don’t.
I am struck here by the curious mixture of justice and injustice in our lives. We are blamed for our real faults but usually not on the right occasions.
Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done.
There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.
What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life, matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations.
To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable in you.
The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hm√°n, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.
Periods’ are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.
Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?
In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Lucifer] could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige.
We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument…Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.
It’s not a question of God ‘sending’ us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that ‘In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth’.
In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.
I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was “Feed my sheep”, not “Try experiments on my rats”, or even “Teach my performing dogs new tricks”.
In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.
Beloved,” said the Glorious One, “unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.
It was when I was happiest that I longed most…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.
Friendship is born at that moment when a single particular person claims to a different: ‘What! You far too? I assumed I was the only real one particular.
Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan.
Could one start a Stagnation Party-which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?
The mark of Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all.
It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain.
I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer.
Our Heavenly Father has provided many delightful inns for us along our journey, but he takes great care to see that we do not mistake any of them for home.
The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.
This is the land of Narnia,’ said the Faun, ‘where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea.
It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.
A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon.
God is not a static thing…but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.
When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.
I wonder if people who asked for God to intervene in our world, really know what they are asking. Will they want to be there when God really does intervene?
I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.
Kids like us don’t often have the chance of meeting a great warrior like you. Would you have a little fencing match with me? It would be frightfully decent.
A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional…values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process
Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.
As a Christian I take it for granted that human history will some day end; and I am offering Omniscience no advice as to the best date for that consummation.
Well!’ said Puddleglum, rubbing his hands. ‘This is just what I needed. If these chaps don’t teach me to take a serious view of life, I don’t know what will.
Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn’t have guessed. That’s one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It’s a religion you couldn’t have guessed.
A Christian is not someone who never goes wrong, but one who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin again, because the Christ-life is inside him.
You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter.
The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.
The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love.”
Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.
Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.
From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it.
Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself
“I wish I had never been born,” she said. “What are we born for?” “For infinite happiness,” said the Spirit. “You can step out into it at any moment…”
Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. it does involve the belief that god loves man and for his sake became man and died.
Something of God… flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.
Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere “opiate of the people” have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor.
If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination.
When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary.
If religion does not make us better people, it will make us very much worse. And of all the bad men who have lived, the religious “bad man” is the worst of all.
Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect.
I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.
I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.
If we continue to make moral judgements (and whatever we say shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of nature.
Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?
Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author’s control.
In order that we finite beings may apprehend the Emporer He translates His glory into multiple forms – into stars, woods, waters, beasts, and the bodies of men.
A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.
To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.
I would prefer to battle the ‘I’m special’ feeling not by the thought, ‘I’m no more special than anyone else,’ by by the feeling, ‘Everyone is as special as me.’
Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that’s all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.
And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician’s Book.
We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge-the last thing we know before things become too swift for us.
Certainly, Lu. Whatever you like,’ said Peter unexpectedly. This was encouraging, but as Peter instantly rolled round and went to sleep again it wasn’t much use.
The idea which…shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience.
Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there’d be no difficulty.
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.
It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.
Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare’s plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters.
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.
Writing is like a ‘lust,’ or like ‘scratching when you itch.’ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I for one must get it out.
Once when I had remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, “Yes. But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs.
Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam–he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.
God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.
In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.
I mean, the more a man was in the Devil’s power, the less he would be aware of it, on the principle that a man is still fairly sober as long as he knows he’s drunk.
When things go wrong, you’ll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.
I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don’t.
There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.
In the truest sense, Christian pilgrims have the best of both worlds. We have joy whenever this world reminds us of the next, and we take solace whenever it does not.
The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus in a woman’s body.
Though I do not believe that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.
I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it.
A man who first tried to guess ‘what the public wants,’ and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave
Do not look sad. We shall meet soon again.” “Please, Aslan”, said Lucy,”what do you call soon?” “I call all times soon” said Aslan; and instantly he was vanished away.
It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.
Will the others see you too?” asked Lucy. “Certainly not at first,” said Aslan. “Later on, it depends.” “But they won‚Äôt believe me!” said Lucy. “It doesn‚Äôt matter.
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable.
No thanks,” said Digory, “I don’t know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I’d rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven.
[the difference between the old and the new education being] in a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.
Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.
The great thing is to be found at one’s post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though the world might last a hundred years.
You must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.
The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe.
One flesh. Or if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends.
Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.
Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.
I cannot understand how a man can appear in print claiming to disbelieve everything that he presupposes when he puts on the surplice. I feel it is a form of prostitution.
Wouldn’t he know without being asked?’ said Polly. ‘I’ve no doubt he would,’ said the Horse (still with his mouth full). ‘But I’ve a sort of an idea he likes to be asked.
But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden-haired, and all princes in those parts desired her to be their Queen, and her own people called her Queen Lucy the Valiant.
Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.
The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.
Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.
Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards obeying the others.
Am I to understand,’ said Reepicheep to Lucy after a long stare at Eustace, ‘That this singularly discourteous person is under your Majesty’s protection? Because, if not–
They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.
The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant – in a word, real.
My friendship you shall have, leanred Man,” piped Reepicheep. “And any Dwarf–or Giant—in the army who does not give you good language shall have my sword to reckon with.
Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place ‚Äì to one friend rather than another and one shire more that all the land.
Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself.
A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun.
Of course, we are to pray for spiritual awakening, and in various ways we can do something toward it. But we must remember that neither Paul nor Apollos gives the increase.
The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic.
If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.
Repentance is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose; it is simply a description of what going back is like.
[Repentance] means unlearning all the self-conceit and self -will that we have been training ourselves into… It means killing part of yourself, under-going a kind of death.
Anyone who endeavors to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened. You are embarking on something that is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.
That’s the worst of girls,” said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. “They never can carry a map in their heads.” “That’s because our heads have something inside them,” said Lucy.
When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.
Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places.
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.
Aslan” said Lucy “you’re bigger”. “That is because you are older, little one” answered he. “Not because you are?” “I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger”.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations–these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.
Safe?‚Äù said Mr. Beaver; ‚Äúdon‚Äôt you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‚ÄòCourse he isn‚Äôt safe. But he‚Äôs good. He‚Äôs the King, I tell you.
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.
Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together. If the voice within us does not say this it is not the voice of Eros.
Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot form their faces like barbedlightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expressioncould easily be mistaken for ferocity.
Being nice doesn‚Äôt make you stupid. It makes you feel good because you know you are gracious enough to forgive and smart enough to realize how distasteful some people can be.
We have not, in fact, proved that science excludes miracles: we have only proved that the question of miracles, like innumerable other questions, excludes laboratory treatment.
The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil‚Äôs whole structure away.
It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.
Of course it should be pointed out that, though all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that he cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted him in this life.
The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods’ surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.
The Christian view is that men were created to be in a certain relationship to God (if we are in that relation to Him, the right relation to one another will follow inevitably).
In a civilization like ours, I feel that everyone has to come to terms with the claims of Jesus Christ upon his life, or else be guilty of inattention or of evading the question.
I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous.
when pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.
Edmund, who was becoming a nastier person every minute, thought that he had scored a great success, and went on at once to say, ‘There she goes again. What’s the matter with her?
The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success.
We must meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their equals…The child as reader is neither to be patronized nor idolized: we talk to him as man to man.
The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker’s desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.
Humans are very seldom either totally sincere or totally hypocritical. Their moods change, their motives are mixed, and they are often quite mistaken as to what their motives are.
As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes
If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.
Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.
Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.
…this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.
Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.
Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise or a sacrilegious abuse of an authority by divine right.
The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn’t stayed put and all has to be done over again.
Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you’d never know which were which.
To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.
Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.
Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.
Those who tread ‘adult’ as a term of approval cannot hope to be considered adult themselves. When I became a man I put away childish things, along with the desire to be very grown up.
For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.
Lucy looked and saw that Aslan had just breathed on the feet of the stone giant. It’s all right!” shouted Aslan joyously. “Once The feet are put right, all the rest of him will follow.
I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say “at last”, I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do ‚Äî so much have I enjoyed it.
There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.
If crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime and compulsorily cured.
[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.
Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body-different from one another and each contributing what no other could.
A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better … ikon. They may make it a worse one.
God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.
The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery.
I have been wandering to find him and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that he called me Beloved, me who am but as a dog.
We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good; if bad, because it works in us patience, humility, contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.
It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal’s voice for a god’s. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god’s voice takes it for a man’s.
until the theologians and the ordained clergy begin to communicate with ordinary people in the vernacular, in a way that they can understand, I‚Äôm going to have to do this sort of thing.
For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.
But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.
A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.
This was bad grammar of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia–in our world they usually don’t talk at all. – The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers-including even his power to revolt…It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.
All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only beloved who will never pass away.
I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now… Come further up, come further in!
The Christian has a great advantage over other men, not by being less fallen than they, nor less doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that he is a fallen man in a fallen world.
We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.
War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.
The whole journey was odd and dream-like — the roaring stream, the wet grey grass, the glimmering cliffs which they were approaching, and always the glorious, silently pacing beast ahead.
For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.
Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can‚Äôt touch and see.
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike…Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.
You can‚Äôt go on ‚Äúseeing through‚Äù things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To ‚Äúsee through‚Äù all things is the same as not to see.
The notion that everyone would like Christianity to be true, and therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense.
Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. (And) There is no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Righ and Wrong are.
For they (art and music) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Every object you see before you at this moment -the walls, ceiling, and furniture, the book, your own washed hands and cut fingernails, bears witness to the colonization of Nature of Reason.
Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy’s) you don’t realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary.
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.
I have come,” said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.
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.
The full acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination
It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself-to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed.
There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.
It is a dreadful truth that the state of having to depend solely on God is what we all dread most…. It is good of Him to force us; but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time.
[The witch] would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor‚Äôs stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.
Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.
Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head, but don’t be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud, one is safe from the worst form of pride.
God has infinite attention, infinite leisure to spare for each one of us. He doesn’t have to take us in the line. You’re as much alone with Him as if you were the only thing He’d ever created.
Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all
Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.
Before God closed in on me, I was offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. But I feel my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair.
I didn‚Äôt go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don‚Äôt recommend Christianity.
You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the univerise in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.
Whatever men expect, they soon come to think they have a right to; the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury. (senior devil speaking)
You don‚Äôt think ‚Äì not possibly ‚Äì not as a mere hundredth chance ‚Äì there might be things that are real though we can‚Äôt see them? ‚Ä¶ If there are souls, could there not be soul-houses?
Badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.
And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to do another and harder and better one.
A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can’t put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover.
The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be “like real life” in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.
To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, not from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees.
I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.
We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?
We thought the Duke would have been pleased if the King’s Majesty would have married his daughter, but nothing came of that–‘ Squints, and has freckles,’ said Caspian. Oh, poor girl,’ said Lucy.
We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.
It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been “had for a sucker” by any number of imposters but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need.
We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.
God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form…The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
We’re free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you’re running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn’t your horse any longer. One might just as well say you’re her human.
When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love.
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.
They were pretty tired by now of course; but not what I‚Äôd call bitterly tired ‚Äì only slow and feeling very dreamy and tired as one does when one is coming to the end of a long day in the open.
There is a difference between a private devotional life and a corporate one. Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa.
Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it.
Satan always sends error into the world in pairs that are opposites. His great hope is that you will get so upset about one of his errors, that you’ll react into the opposite one, and he’s got you.
Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says; we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.
We have discovered that the scheme of ‘outlawing war’ has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant.
You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring into his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.
I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell; and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.
The Christian “doctrines” are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection
And that’s why, gentleman, if your little girl doesn’t come up to scratch, it will be our painful duty to cut all your throats. Merely in a way of business, as you might say, and no offense, I hope.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.
Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.
He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.
If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing-rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.
If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?
I was wondering ‚Äî I mean ‚Äî could there be some mistake? Because nobody called me and Scrubb, you know. It was we who asked to come here. You would not have called me unless I had been calling you.
It’s all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies – fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past.
Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of lucifer…. An instrument strung, but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician
To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’
What we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. In the main I loved you for my own sake: because I needed you…We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly.
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.
You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.
Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.
Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.
Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines.
We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.
And so take away his work, which was his life [. . .] and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?
You can’t lay down any pattern for God. There are many different ways of bringing people into his Kingdom, even some ways that I specially dislike! I have therefore learned to be cautious in my judgment.
The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.
Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more, When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death, And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.
Child, that is why all the rest are now a horror to her. That is what happens to those who pluck and eat fruits at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Oh, the fruit is good, but they loath it ever after.
When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason. Ho, my beauties!
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.
But no one except Lucy knew that as it circled the mast it had whispered to her, “Courage, dear heart,” and the voice, she felt sure, was Aslan’s, and with the voice a delicious smell breathed in her face.
I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, of this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
The only way to drive out bad culture is to create good culture. We need to recognize that artistic talent is a gift from the Lord – and that developing those talents is the only way to create good culture.
Christ, who said to the disciples, ‘You 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 Christians say that God has done miracles. The modern world, even when it believes in God, and even when it has see the defenselessness of nature, does not. It thinks God would not do that sort of thing.
The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?
Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good – above all, that we are better than someone else – I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil.
Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the old Christian rule is, “Either marriage, with completely faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.”
I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that?
The hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as the substitute is to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal.
A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult to save.
That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.
That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal sufferring, “No future bliss can make up for it” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.
Of Course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is)… Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.
I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.
At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget[…]that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.
Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?
Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us – an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof ‘God did it’ and ‘I did it’ are both true descriptions.
God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.
Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.
You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan. “And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.
Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?
Literary Experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.. .Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.
Catch {a man} at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove, I’m being humble,” and almost immediately pride – pride at his own humility – will appear.
Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.
I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.
the sweet heavy smell grew very much less. For though the whole fire had not been put out, a good bit of it had, and what remained smelled very largely of burnt Marsh-wiggle, which is not at all an enchanting smell.
Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work’s sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.
People talk as if grief were just a feeling — as if it weren’t the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
Don’t you mind,” said Puddleglum. “There are no accidents. Our guide is Aslan; and he was there when the giant king caused the letters to be cut, and he knew already all things that would come of them; including this.
You see, Aslan didn’t tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he’s up, I shouldn’t wonder. But that doesn’t let us off following the signs. – The Silver Chair
Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.
An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. [speaking of George MacDonald]
True friends don‚Äôt spend time gazing into each other‚Äôs eyes. They may show great tenderness towards each other but they face in the same direction – toward common projects, goals – above all, towards a common Lord.
I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.
Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (‘How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!’) In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.
…the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him…” – C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory
Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one.
There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘man’s search for God’!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?
If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note.
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
Devils are depicted with bats’ wings and good angels with birds’ wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.
The more imagination the reader has … the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.
When he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realized that while his lips had been saying ‘Oh Lord, make me chaste,’ his heart had been secretly adding, ‘But please don’t do it just yet.
We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows.
Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.
If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.
A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.
Oh, Lor!’ said the boy, sitting down on the grassy bank at the edge of the shrubbery and very quickly getting up again because the grass was soaking wet. His name was unfortunately Eustace Scrubb but he wasn’t a bad sort.
What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.
Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.
So that the one road for which we now need God’s leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. But suppose God became a man… He could surrender His will, suffer and die, because He was a man.
An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.
Scripture itself is not systematic; the New Testament shows the greatest variety. God has shown us that he can use any instrument. Balaam’s ass, you remember, preached a very effective sermon in the midst of his ‘hee-haws.’
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‚Äòlove‚Äô your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
When humans should have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.
I haven’t any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.
If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
Don’t say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.
The people who keep asking if they can’t lead a decent life without Christ, don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that ‘a decent life’ is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for.
The only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. Our charities should pinch and hamper us. If we live at the same level of affluence as other people who have our level of income, we are probably giving away too little.
But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn‚Äôt yet, or used to be Human once and isn‚Äôt now, or ought to be Human and isn‚Äôt, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.
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.
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them – never become even conscious of them all.
The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don’t forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.
If you find that the reader of popular romances–however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances–goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.
[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist’s shop.
Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‚Äòpatches of Godlight‚Äô in the woods of our experience.
I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse… Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil.
At a well in a yard they met a man who was beating a boy. The stick burst into a flower in the mans hand. He tried to drop it, but it stuck to his hand. His arm became a branch, his body the trunk of a tree, his feet took root.
Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness.
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.
Post-Christian man is not the same as Pre-Christian man. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-be and a spouse lost.
Every poet and musician and artist, but for grace”>Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.
The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self changed into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One’s most private wishes, one’s point of view, are the things that have to be changed.
When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: “I seen ’em myself!” he said fiercely.
The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forewarmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.
Shall I ever be able to read that story again; the one I couldn’t remember? Will you tell it to me, Aslan? Oh do,do,do.” “Indeed,yes, I will tell it to you for years and years. But now, come. We must meet the master of this house.
I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.
Sanity … had it ever been more than a convention — a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?
When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment‚Ä¶is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can‚Äôt provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.
God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.
You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.
To every soul, God will look like its first love because He IS its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it – made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.
And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back–if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?
The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.
All the time the joke is that the word “mine” in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either [Satan] or God will say “mine” of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.
Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.
All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: “O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!” Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: “Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.
Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.
I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.
While friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.
There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he “has read” them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will most certainly be wrung and possibly broken … The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature.
We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
Daughter, I have now lived a hundred and nine winters in this world and have never yet met any such thing as Luck. There is something about all this that I do not understand: but if ever we need to know it, you may be sure that we shall.
I could well believe that it is God’s intention, since we have refused milder remedies, to compel [Christians] into unity, by persecution even. Satan is without doubt nothing else than a hammer in the hand of a benevolent and severe God.
Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females‚Äîand there is more in that than you might suppose.
The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?
The real moon,if you could reach it and survive it, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else…no man would find an abiding strangness on the moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.
Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.
The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
As St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only “as harmless as doves,” but also “as wise as serpents.” He wants a child’s heart, but a grown-up’s head.
The proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator‚Äîto enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy.
I believe that there are too many accommodating preachers… Jesus Christ did not say “Go into the world and tell the world that it is quite right.” The Gospel is something completely different. In fact, it is directly opposed to the world.
To be in love involves the most irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness.
When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.
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.
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
Giant Wimbleweather burst into one of those not very intelligent laughs to which the nicer sort of Giants are so liable. He checked himself at once and looked as grace as a turnip by the time Reepicheep discovered where the noise came from.
If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.
He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of Life He has – by what I call ‘good infection’. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.
The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden…A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved although it does tell us a good deal about those who hold it.
Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about…)
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
Digory never spoke on the way back, and the others were shy of speaking to him. He was very sad and he wasn’t even sure all the time that he had done the right thing; but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan’s eyes he became sure.
Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes‚Äîlike the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night ‚Äîlittle flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape wil be quite hidden in the end.
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say ‚ÄúMy tooth is aching‚Äù than to say ‚ÄúMy heart is broken.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible Gods and Goddesses. To remember that the dullest, and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.
There is someone that I love even though I don’t approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is……me.
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself.
It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power — it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.
After an error you need not only to remove the causes but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an ‘undoing’ is required.
This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea, and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal.
I am suffering incessant temptations to uncharitable thoughts at present; one of those black moods in which nearly all one’s friends seem to be selfish or even false. And how terrible that there should be even a kind of pleasure in thinking evil.
We ‘have all we want’ is a terrible saying when ‘all’ does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, ‘God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full – there’s nowhere for Him to put it.’
Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.
All of you. And you, doorkeeper. No one is to be let out of the house today. And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks. There.
Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.
There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was ‘the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.’
The most intense joy, lies not in the having, but in the desire, Delight that never fades, bliss that is eternal, Is only your, when what you most desire, is just out of reach…Anthony Hopkins, from the movie Shadowlands, where he plays C. S. Lewis
Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling… we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.
If I had really cared as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came- I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me, now it matters and I find I didn’t.
The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt – even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called.
The next moment is as much beyond our grasp, and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is as foolish as care for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything.
If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions ‚Äì if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before ‚Äì then I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary.
In your life you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some that you wish you never have to think about again. But you do.
I am a product […of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them…. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history‚Äîmoney, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery‚Äîthe long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years’ study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works.
Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.
All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.
The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds him liking more and more people as he goes on – including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.
The event of falling in love… in one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being.
All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness; was it an elf in the blood? Or a bird in the brain? Or even part of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud, uplifted wave of a journeying angels transit over and through my heart?
The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” He also said: “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of 50 and beyond.
I have seen great beauty of spirit in some who were great sufferers. I have seen men, for the most part, grow better not worse with advancing years, and I have seen the last illness produce treasures of fortitude and meekness from most unpromising subjects.
A great deal of what is being published by writers in the religious tradition is a scandal and is actually turning people away from the church. The liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel are responsible.
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life — the life God is sending one day by day.
Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them.
A sensible human once said, “If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit”; and again, “She’s the sort of woman who lives for others you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.
It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.
No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters’ side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’
Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to ‘cure’ it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers.
God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity … down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him.
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.
But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. ‘A devilish temper she had,’ he would say. ‘But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?
If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.
You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly; while you are making them you cannot see them. Good people know about both bad and evil; bad people do not know about either.
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process. It needs not a map, but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop.
Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity, which, in spite of its divisions, it has never lost. I trembled on recognizing the same unmistakable aroma coming from the writings of Dante and Bunyan, Thomas Aquinas and William Law.
Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden).
Grief … gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I 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.
Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.
One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.
Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become a child again, even now… You have gone wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.
I felt ashamed.” “But of what? Psyche, they hadn’t stripped you naked or anything?” “No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal — of being a mortal.” “But how could you help that?” “Don’t you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can’t help?
Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.
The thing is to rely on God. The time will come when you will regard all this misery as a small price to pay for having been brought to that dependence. Meanwhile, the trouble is that relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing has yet been done.
Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.
But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are “on” concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.
The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.
All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.
I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.
If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
And there, right in the middle of it, I find ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.’ There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.
“Welcome, Prince,” said Aslan. “Do you feel yourself sufficient to take up the Kingship of Narnia?” “I – I don’t think I do, Sir,” said Caspian. “I’m only a kid.” “Good,” said Aslan. “If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been a proof that you were not.”
Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I’m afraid, even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
No one can say ‘He jests at scars who never felt a wound’ for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am that man.
With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.
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. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
It is hard to have patience with people who say ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.
Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.
Fools!” said the man, stamping his foot with rage. “That is the sort of talk that brought me here, and I’d better have been drowned or never born. Do you hear what I say? This is where dreams ‚Äî dreams, do you understand ‚Äî come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.
At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words ‘true’ or ‘false’.
we follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus-not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in his eyes than in ours.
In a sense it (Christianity) creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteousness and loving.
For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.
We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century […] lies where we have never suspected it […] The only palliative is […] by reading old books. […] the books of the future would be just as good […], but unfortunately we cannot get at them.
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.
If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of ‘religion.’
The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.
Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours if it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static pain often is… is it not yet enough?
If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.
In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations.
We may note in passing that He (Jesus) was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects – Hatred – Terror – Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild admiration.
We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.
We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.
Nothing less will shake a man ‚Äî or at any rate a man like me ‚Äî out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.
Death and resurrection are what the story is about and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables.
A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place [if we anticipate and look for it, rather than wallow in our ‘supposed loss’. It can be helpful to think of the loss of that blessing as simply necessary to make way for another different blessing].
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.
If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
What can you ever really know of other people’s souls ‚Äî of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole of creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him.
I wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.
A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed.
Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…”Safe?” said Mr Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.
Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.
To please God‚Ä¶ to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness‚Ä¶ to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.
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.
As Christians we are tempted to make unnecessary concessions to those outside the faith. We give in too much. Now, I don’t mean that we should run the risk of making a nuisance of ourselves by witnessing at improper times, but there comes a time when we must show that we disagree.
What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining ‘It’s not fair’ before you can say Jack Robinson.
The Old Testament contains fabulous elements. The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical. As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out.
Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.
He’ll be coming and going” he had said. “One day you’ll see him and another you won’t. He doesn’t like being tied down–and of course he has other countries to attend to. It’s quite all right. He’ll often drop in. Only you mustn’t press him. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.
I expect you have seen someone put a a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened; and then you notice a tiny steak of flame creeping along the edged of the newspaper. It was like that now.
On the whole, God‚Äôs love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.
There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than the doctrine of hell, if it lay in my power. But it has the support of Scripture and, especially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by the Christian Church, and it has the support of reason.
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means that you are very conceited indeed.
The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work.
Hell is a state of mind — ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind — is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.
I’m not sure God wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering.
One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realize your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.
They were really getting quite fond of their strange pet and hoped that Aslan would allow them to keep it. The cleverer ones were quite sure by now that at least some of the noises which came out of his mouth had a meaning. They christened him Brandy because he made that noise so often.
We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”
Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man’s functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.
Time is the very lens through which ye see – small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope – something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality.
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies‚Äîthose vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
But why,… if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own? Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality.
The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting?
We can conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of abuse of free will by His creatures: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when used as a weapon… But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and therefore, freedom of the will would be void.
When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, “hullo! i’m growing up.” It is only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call “growing up.
On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, . . . they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.
Of course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking with cheerful seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
While we are actually subjected to them, the ‘moods’ and ‘spirits’ of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, ‘Look. Listen. Attend.
We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect but how we should pray being as we now are … It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They’ll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don’t you worry.
‚Äé”Don’t bother too much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behavior
But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
Here the whole world (stars, water, air, And field, and forest, as they were Reflected in a single mind) Like cast off clothes was left behind In ashes, yet with hopes that she, Re-born from holy poverty, In lenten lands, hereafter may Resume them on her Easter Day.” (Epitaph for Joy Gresham)
Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means.
The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right.
If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.
There have been men before who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself, as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.
The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God.
I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much are what make us perfect.
The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can’t both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn’t fit the real universe. Consequently, with the best will in the world, he will be helping his fellow creatures to their destruction.
My son, by all means desist from kicking the venerable and enlightened Vizier: for as a costly jewel retains its value even if hidden in a dung-hill, so old age and discretion are to be respected even in the vile persons of our subjects. Desist therefore, and tell us what you desire and propose.
It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.
The standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.
Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object ‚Äì we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.
But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.
I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in ‘the High Countries’.
The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.
She stepped out from among their shifting confusion of lovely lights and shadows. A circle of grass, smooth as a lawn, met her eyes, with dark trees dancing all around it. And then –Oh Joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him.
But if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, ‘Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.
A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.
You ask ‚Äòfor what‚Äô God wants you. Isn‚Äôt the primary answer that He wants you. We‚Äôre not told that the lost sheep was sought out for anything except itself [Matthew 18:12-14; Luke 15:3-7]. Of course, He may have a special job for you: and the certain job is that of becoming more and more His.
A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others…thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.
If and when a horror turns up you will then be given Grace to help you. I don’t think one is usually given it in advance. “Give us our daily bread” (not an annuity for life) applies to spiritual gifts too; the little daily support for the daily trial. Life has to be taken day by day and hour by hour.
We must learn by experience to avoid either trains of thought or social situations which for us (not necessarily for everyone) lead to temptations. Like motoring-don’t wait till the last moment before you put on the brakes but put them on, gently and quietly, while the danger is still a good way off.
You have a traitor there, Aslan,” said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking about himself after all he’d been through and after the talk he’d had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn’t seem to matter what the Witch said.
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.
I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness; you are not needed there at all. No scope of your talents; only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God. (pg 40)
When there came a sound that I’d never heard the like of in all my born days. Eh, I won’t forget that. The whole air was full of it, loud as thunder but far longer, cool and sweet as music over water but strong enough to shake the woods. And I said to myself, ‘If that’s not the Horn, call me a rabbit.
The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.
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.
There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.
A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing. But in ordinary life no one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its mother; nor an adult who turns to his fellow “for company.” Those, whether children or adults, who do so least are not usually the most selfless.
And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.
When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were.
As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise… For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.
Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.
The worst of sleeping out of doors is that you wake up so dreadfully early. And when you wake up you have to get up because the ground is so hard you are uncomfortable. And it makes matters worse if there is nothing but apples for breakfast and you have had nothing but apples for supper the night before.
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.’s lover. Now it’s like an empty house.
Materialism is in fact no protection. Those who seek it in that hope (they are not a negligible class) will be disappointed. The thing you fear is impossible. Well and good. Can you therefore cease to fear it? Not here and now. And what then? If you must see ghosts, it is better not to disbelieve in them.
Away with tears and fears and troubles! United in wedlock with the eternal Godhead Itself, our nature ascends into the Heaven of Heavens. So it would be impious to call ourselves ‘miserable.’ On the contrary, Man is a creature whom the Angels-were they capable of envy-would envy. Let us lift up our hearts!
The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.
This is where men, even the trustiest, fail us. Their heart is never so wholly given to any matter but that some trifle of a meal, or a drink, or a sleep, or a joke, or a girl, may come in between them and it, and then (even if you are a queen) you’ll get no more good out of them until they’ve had their way.
I’m hunger. I’m thirst. Where I bite, I hold till I die, and even after death they must cut out my mouthful from my enemy’s body and bury it with me. I can fast a hundred years and not die. I can lie a hundred nights on the ice and not freeze. I can drink a river of blood and not burst. Show me your enemies.
The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. . .It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.
I gave up Christianity at about 14. Came back to it when getting on for 30. Not an emotional conversion; almost purely philosophical. I didn’t want to. I’m not in the least a religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I’m my own master; but since the facts seemed to be just the opposite, I had to give in.
That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is out chance to chose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it.
Nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee.
If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
And He [God] and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble–delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.
I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact.
And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
But do you really mean, Sir,” said Peter, “that there could be other worlds-all over the place, just round the corner-like that?” “Nothing is more probable,” said the Profesor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, “I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.
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.
In Charn [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical.
We do not want merely to see beauty… we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.
The command “Be ye prfect” is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He said (in the Bible) that we were “gods” and he is going to make good his words. He will make us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature…a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn’t be a great moral teacher. He’d be either a lunatic on a level with a man who says he’s a poached egg or else he’d be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.
The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing than worshipping … ‘Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god.
We must beware of the Past, mustn’t we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved.
And all the time – such is the tragic comedy of our situation – we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
In my experience, it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate the people who ‘happen to be there.’ Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.
Our struggle is–isn’t it?–to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. … 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‚Äîthe only complete realist.
I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.
Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.
But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.
We are not living in a world where all roads are radii if a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision.
When we want to be something other than the thing that God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy…whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing ‚Äî to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from ‚Äî my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.
For the church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ, in which all members, however different, (and He rejoices in their differences and by no means wishes to iron them out) must share the common life, complementing and helping one another precisely by their differences.
The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint … but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
Those who put themselves in His hands will become perfect, as He is perfect- perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, health, and immortality. The change will not be completed in this life, for death is an important part of the treatment. How far the change will have gone before death in any particular Christian is uncertain.
God can show Himself as He really is only to real men. And that means not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like; like players in one band, or organs in one body.
The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.
No, I don‚Äôt wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.
Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority… Every historical event in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada.
Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.
We must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste.
The people with very hard problems are understood by God. He knows what wretched machines they are trying to drive. Some day he will fling them away and give those people new ones; then they may astonish everyone, for they learned their driving in a hard school. Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last.
And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.
The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?
A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live; a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go: to stay here is death.
He (the devil) always sends errors into the world in pairs–pairs of opposites…He relies on your extra dislike of one to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.
I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc., don’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking ourselves up each time…The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give up.
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.
The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.
What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn‚Äôt matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it‚Äôs thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.
If God thinks this state of war in the universe is a price worth paying for free will–that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings–then we may take it it is worth paying.
We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. They they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.
And in that far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this will happen more and more. For mortals, as you said, will become more and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature.
Alas,” said Aslan, shaking his head. “It will. Things always work according to their nature. She has won her heart’s desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.
A dragon has just flown over the tree-tops and lighted on the beach. Yes, I am afraid it is between us and the ship. And arrows are no use against dragons. And they’re not at all afraid of fire.” “With your Majesty’s leave-” began Reepicheep. “No, Reepicheep,” said the King very firmly, “you are not to attempt a single combat with it.
He didn’t call his father and mother ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’ but Harold and Alberta. They were very up to date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers, and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.
The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.
What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.
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.
Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.
To be ignorant and simple now-not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground-would be to throw down our weapons and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.
What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit-balance in the Enemy’s ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these ‘smug’, commonplace neighbors at all.
You must ask for God’s help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
He is not the soul of Nature, nor any part of Nature. He inhabits eternity: He dwells in a high and holy place: heaven is His throne, not his vehicle, earth is his footstool, not his vesture. One day he will dismantle both and make a new heaven and earth. He is not to be identified even with the ‘divine spark’ in man. He is ‘God and not man.
I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature to be exploited or, at best, patronised. Only one or two, and those the holiest among us, would glance a second time at the naked, shaggy-bearded, slow spoken creature: but they, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet.
Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can’t see it. So quietly submit to be painted—i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk—don’t keep on looking at it.
Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another…Ten-thirty– and every other moment from the beginning of the world–is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal…. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ verse latitat – the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.
One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.
In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble–because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.” – Mere Christianity
The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.
Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call “humble” nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is a nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him.
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self–all your wishes and precautions–to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call “ourselves,” to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be “good.
In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere ‚Äî “Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.” God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
But the most obvious fact about praise ‚Äî whether of God or anything ‚Äî strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.
Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are ‘done away’ and the rest is a matter of flying.
Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature…
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water…If I find in myself a desire, which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
Of course all children’s literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children’s books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.
When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then – that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.
Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment ‘as to the Lord.’ It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
There are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid and disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine because that is how God loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but He delights to give.
He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses. This makes sense only if He really was God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin.
Perhaps civilization will never be safe until we care for something else more than we care for it. The hypothesis has certain facts to support it. As far as peace (which is one ingredient in our idea of civilization)is concerned, I think many would now agree that a foreign policy dominated by desire for peace is one of the many roads that lead to war.
The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.
Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.
And in truth (as I now see) I had the wish to put off my journey as long as I could. Not for any peril or labour it might cost; but because I could see nothing in the whole world for me to do once it was accomplished. AS long as this act lay before me, there was, as it were, some barrier between me and the dead desert which the rest of my life must be.
If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that his operations will often appear to us far from beneficent and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give him our confidence in spite of this.
Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work build up in him a sense of being really at home on earth which is just what we want.
Though it was bright sunshine everyone felt suddenly cold. The only two people present who seemed to be quite at their ease were Aslan and the Witch herself. It was the oddest thing to see those two faces – the golden face and the dead-white face so close together. Not that the Witch looked Aslan exactly in his eyes; Mrs Beaver particularly noticed this.
A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat “Do as you would be done by” till I am black in the fact, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God.
An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else.
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?
The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read ‘in the same spirit that the author writ.’… He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.
When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing tastes, interests and capacity of his audience. These no less than the language , the marble, the paint, are part of his aw material.; to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored or defied. Haughty indifference to them is not genius, it is laziness and incompetence.
Christ says, ‘Give me all. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you….Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked- the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you myself: my own will shall become yours.
There is one bit of advice given us by the ancient Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest; and lending money at interest – what we call investment – is the basis of our whole system.
Need-love says of a woman “I cannot live without her”; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection – if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.
It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ [everything]. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.
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 the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
An ‘impersonal God’-well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads-better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap-best of all. But God himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, King, husband-that is quite another matter.
As long as you notice, and have to count the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not conciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.
.. suppose we have only dreamed and made up these things like sun, sky, stars, and moon, and Aslan himself. In that case, it seems to me that the made-up things are a good deal better than the real ones. And if this black pits of a kingdom is the best you can make, then it’s a poor world. And we four can make a dream world to lick your real one hollow.
And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.
..is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself.
To the glistening Eastern sea, I give you Queen Lucy, the Valiant. To the great Western Wood, King Edmund the Just. To the radiant Southern sun, Queen Susan, the Gentle; and to the clear Northern sky I give you King Peter, the Magnificent. Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen. May your wisdom grace us ’til the stars rain down from the heavens.
We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way (there is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.
This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we–even our poets and musicians and inventors–never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials to build from. All we can know about the act of creation must be derived from what we can gather about the relation of the creatures to their Creator
In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.
God lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.
A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don‚Äôt think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we‚Äôre doing it, I think we‚Äôre meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds‚Äô song and the frosty sunrise.
There is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and he wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.
Whatever he says, let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it ‘for a reasonable period’–and let the reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last. It need not be much shorter; in attacks on patience, chastity, and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight.
It is a poor thing to strike our colors to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up ‘our own’ when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him.
All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door.
Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved‚Ä¶ Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.
The value of the Old Testament may be dependant on what seems its imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way-to find the Word in it…to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God’s gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works.
If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.
No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‚Äòa gentleman does not cheat‚Äô, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.
When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world. The wartime posters told us that Careless Talk costs Lives. It is equally true that Careless Lives cost Talk. Our careless lives set the outer world talking; and we give them grounds for talking in a way that throws doubt on the truth of Christianity itself.
When the author walks on the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right…something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise…it will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up.
The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gifts…Thus a heavy task is laid upon Gift-love. It must work toward its own abdication. We must aim at making ourselves superfluous. The hour when we can say ‘They need me no longer’ should be our reward. But the instinct, simply in its own nature, has no power to fulfill this law.
Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for “down here” is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment’s rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
Why should your majesty think it? My own plans are made. While I may, I sail East in Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I row East in my coracle. When that sinks, shall I paddle East with my four paws. Then, when I can swim no longer, if I have not yet reached Aslan’s Country, there shall I sink with my nose to the sunrise… and Peepiceek will be head of Talking Mice in Narnia
The New Testament writers speak as if Christ’s achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the ‘first fruits,’ the pioneer of life,’ He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so.
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 cruel people to the top, and then it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down.
Vanity is really the least bad and most pardonable sort. The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a childlike and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you. You are in fact still human.
Non-Christians seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity. No creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed. They that are whole need not the physician. Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.
You must make your choice: either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other.
We feasted on love; every mode of it, solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. She was my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign, my trusty comrade, friends, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend has ever been to me.
If you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ’s body…every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who along can help them. Cutting off a man’s fingers would be a odd way of getting him to do more work.
Ambition! We must be careful what we mean by it. If it means the desire to get ahead of other people – which is what I think it does mean – then it is bad. If it means simply wanting to do a thing well, then it is good. It isn’t wrong for an actor to want to act his part as well as it can possibly be acted, but the wish to have his name in bigger type than the other actors is a bad one.
The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good – anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.
A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he‚Äôd always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.
No one returns from Christianity to the same state he was before Christianity but into a worse state: the difference between a pagan and an apostate is the difference between an unmarried woman and an adulteress. For faith perfects nature but faith lost corrupts nature. Therefore many men of our time have lost not only the supernatural light but also the natural light which pagans possessed.
Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realizing that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor-that is the only way out of a “hole.” This process of surrender-this movement full speed astern-is repentance.
The naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one’s own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote or abstruse; it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.
I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her. And I knew who wept, and what had been done to her, and who had done it.
He wondered how he could ever have thought of the planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets – as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven – excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.
Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.
Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let the villans be soundly killed at the end of the book. I think it is possible that by confining your child to the blameless stories of life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable.
If you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.
Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.
And that’s why, when they want to get rid of anyone, they usually bring him down here (like they were doing with me) and say they’ll leave him to the ghosts. But I always wondered if they didn’t really drown ’em or cut their throats. I never quite believed in the ghosts. But those two cowards you’ve just shot believed all right. They were more scared of taking me to my death than I was of going.
We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities, and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
You will say these are very small sins… [But] it does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts
Emeth speaking of Aslan, “Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek…And since then, O Kings and Ladies, I have been wandering to find him and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that he called me Beloved, me who am but as a dog
The Calormens have dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-colored turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people. They bowed most politely to Caspian and paid him long compliments all about the fountains of prosperity irrigating the gardens of prudence and virtue –and things like that– but of course what they wanted was the money they had paid.
In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.
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… 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.
Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.
I am perfectly convinced that whatever the gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear they are not that sort of thing….Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has based any doctrine on it. And the act of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is purely a modern art.
The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.
Emeth came walking forward into the open strip of grass between the bonfire and the Stable. His eyes were shining, his face was solemn, his hand was on his sword-hilt, and he carried his head high. Jill felt like crying when she looked at his face. And Jewel whispered in the King’s ear, “By the Lion’s Mane, I almost love this young warrior, Calormene though he be. He is worthy of a better god than Tash.
Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think…of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.
And above all, you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling‚Ä¶the question should never be: ‚ÄòDo I like that kind of service?‚Äô but ‚ÄòAre these doctrines true: Is holiness there? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to move to this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike for this particular door-keeper?
Our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously – no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner – no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
As to…old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can’t be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.
Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. . . look to Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
[S]omething inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it anymore. That is not how things happen. I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible.
You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better – the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read.
This is our dilemma–either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste–or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.
Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that…. The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.
Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question “What on earth is he up to now?” will intrude. It lays one’s devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, “I wish they’d remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.
At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life,’ can add to it.
There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline , and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy‚Äôs (God‚Äôs) ground‚Ä¶He [God] made the pleasure: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He [God] has forbidden.
…we sacrifice other species to our own not because our own has any objective metaphysical privilege over others, but simply because it is ours. It may be very natural to have this loyalty to our own species, but let us hear no more from the naturalists about the “sentimentality” of anti-vivisectionists. If loyalty to our own species – preference for man simply because we are men – is not sentiment, then what is?
If the immutable heart can be grieved by the puppets of its own making, it is Divine Omnipotence, no other, that has subjected it, freely, and in a humility that passes understanding. If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God, but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.
..(T)here are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.
All right, beautiful. You’ve got me tied down to this stone table, and there’s a knife in your hand that says you get to rule Narnia for another hundred years. So maybe I die, and winter goes on. Maybe the hunger and the darkness and the fear never end. But as long as the children believe in me, I know that Aslan will live again. I, the Great Lion, Son of The Emperor Over The Sea, will live again and — aaaaauugh!!
For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God has made the world- that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colors and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.
By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the the impossible.
All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that’s my job…And I’m prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legends or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I’ve read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff.
To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death — these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.
The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility…According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members.” –about the only statement i agree with in this book
Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into joy? Should we not reply, With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleansed first. It may hurt, you know-even so, sir.
Man has got to take charge of Man…. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning int he end and direct manipulation of the brain.
Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive — who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture — almost the pr√©cis — we’ve made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact.
My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue.
Is it easy to love God’ asks an old author. ‘It is easy,’ he replies, ‘to those who do it.’ I have included two Graces under the word Charity. But God can give a third. He can awake in man, towards Himself, a supernatural Appreciative love. This is of all gifts the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true centre of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible.
All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it, tantalizing 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.’
It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?” “But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan. “Are -are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund. “I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.
I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.
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.
To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator. When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest t all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed bu increased.
Wisdom: The first error is that of the southern people, and it consists in holding that these eastern and western places are real places. Give no quarter to that thought, whether it threatens you with fear, or tempts you with hopes. For this is Superstition and all who believe it will come in the end to the swamps, to the south and the jungles, to the far south. Part of the same error is to think that the Landlord is a real man.
Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about moral values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation.
I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. ‚ÄúEmotional‚Äù is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.
The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism – for that is what the words ‘one flesh’ would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact – just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument.
A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. It was hardly a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.
The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.
The Intelligentsia (scientists apart) are losing all touch with, and all influence over, nearly the whole human race. Our most esteemed poets and critics are read by our most esteemed critics and poets (who don’t usually like them much) and nobody else takes any notice. An increasing number of highly literate people simply ignore what the ‘Highbrows’ are doing. It says nothing to them. The Highbrows in return ignore and insult them.
Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.
But what manner of use would it be ploughing through that darkness?’ asked Drinian. Use?’ replied Reepicheep. ‘Use, Captain?’ If you mean by filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventures. And here is as great an adventure as I have ever heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours.
Are not 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.
For in grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often — will it be for always? — how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, “I never realized my loss till this moment”? The same leg is cut off time after time.
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
A perfect practice of Christianity would, of course, consist in a perfect imitation of the life of Christ — I mean, in so far as it was applicable in one’s own particular circumstance. Not in an idiotic sense — it doesn’t mean that every Christian should grow a beard, or be a bachelor, or become a travelling preacher. It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God.
Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles….He’s our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.
I have seen something like it happen in battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped out cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face – friends for a moment – and then at once enemies again and forever.
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods)as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the bench and God is in the dock.
Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can’t follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We’d rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We’d rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.
The search for a “suitable” church makes the man a critic where God wants him to be a pupil. What he wants from the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise- does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.
Far overhead from beyond the veil of blue sky which hid them the stars sang again; a pure, cold, difficult music. Then there came a swift flash like fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself, and every drop of blood tingled in the children’s bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.
Do you mean to say,” asked Caspian, “that you three come from a round world (round like a ball) and you’ve never told me! It’s really too bad for you. Because we have fairy-tales in which there are round worlds and I have always loved them ‚Ä¶ Have you ever been to the parts where people walk about upside-down?” Edmund shook his head. “And it isn’t like that,” he added. “There’s nothing particularly exciting about a round world when you’re there.
Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)
One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons–marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.
I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow – getting into my morning bath is usually one of them – that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.
A work of (whatever) art can be either ‘received’ or ‘used’. …’Using’ is inferior to ‘reception’ because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it … When the art in question is literature a complication arises, for to ‘receive’ significant words is always, in one sense, to ‘use’ them, to go through and beyond them to an imagined something which is not itself verbal.
Lucy said, ‘We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.’ ‘No fear of that,’ said Aslan. ‘Have you not guessed?’ Their hearts leapt, and a wild hope rose within them. ‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are- as you used to call it in the Shadowlands- dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.
It would be impossible to accept naturalism itself if we really and consistently believed naturalism. For naturalism is a system of thought. But for naturalism all thoughts are mere events with irrational causes. It is, to me at any rate, impossible to regard the thoughts which make up naturalism in that way and, at the same time, regard them as a real insight into external reality…If it is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat.
What we have been told is how we men can be drawn into Christ-can become part of that wonderful present which the young Prince of the universe wants to offer to His Father-that present which is Himself and therefore us in Him. It is the only thing we were made for. And there are strange, exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in, a great many other things in Nature will begin to come right. The bad dream will be over: it will be morning.
Monarchy can easily be “debunked,” but watch the faces, mark well the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film stars instead: For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.
Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself. In reality, because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must, even more wholeheartedly than they, invoke the divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet. For consider how narrow its true path is. Is must not become what the people call a “mutual admiration society”; yet if it is not full of mutual admiration, of Appreciative love, it is not Friendship at all.
My own eyes are not enough for me…I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many is not enough…I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee. More gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.
The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality of whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them.
I would say if a man is going to write on chemistry, he learns chemistry. The same is true of Christianity. But to speak of the craft itself, I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer. Writing is like a ‘lust,’ or like ‘scratching when you itch.’ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I for one must get it out.
who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and His compulsion is our liberation.
When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act‚Äîthat is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?
The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‚Äòdoing‚Äô his ‚ÄòEnglish prep‚Äô and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.
You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred – like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.
A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.
We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world….No doubt pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. it removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul.
… believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him ‘good’ and worshipping him is a still greater danger… The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of scripture is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissable.
When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft. Protestantism,in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being too much like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.
There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. [‚Ä¶] There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves.[‚Ä¶]The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.
When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be ‚Äî or so it feels‚Äî welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.
The man is a humbug ‚Äî a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist’s air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn’t dull.
Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.
In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by the group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say.
I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the horses the new strength of fear for the last mill so that you should reach King Lune in time. 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.
The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden-that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.
You asked for a loving God: you have one… The consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes.
A Centaur has a man-stomach and a horse-stomach. And of course both want breakfast. So first of all he has porridge and pavenders and kidneys and bacon and omlette and cold ham and toast and marmalade and coffee and beer. And after that he tends to the horse part of himself by grazing for an hour or so and finishing up with a hot mash, some oats, and a bag of sugar. That’s why it’s such a serious thing to ask a Centaur to stay for the weeekend. A very serious thing indeed.
Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners.
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God‚Äôs myth where the others are men‚Äôs myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’.
Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us-to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.
She looked at a silver birch: it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty, old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his fact and hands, with hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah! –she would be the best of all. She would be a gracious goddess, smooth and stately, the Lady of the Wood.
It means that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still that she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and darkness before Time began, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and death itself would work backwards.
The Christian claim is: Nothing explains the facts better than an all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent god creating the universe and sending Jesus to spread his message. This is about as remarkable a claim as could be stated, and yet it is tossed out lightly. Christians seem to imagine that “God did it” is as plausible as the natural explanation that stories grow with the retelling. The Christian has the burden of proof, and it’s an enormous burden given this enormous claim.
When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others‚Äînot because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.
What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history – the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief – surely it is very bad biology – that we can literally ‘inherit’ tradition.
Both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporary suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me but have this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.
But as for Aslan himself, the Beavers and the children didn’t know what to do or say when they saw him. People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the children had ever thought so, they were cured of it now. For when they tried to look at Aslan’s face they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes; and then they found they couldn’t look at him and went all trembly.
We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.
The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials “for the sake of humanity”, and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.
In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves, in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers – a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians – a Church that can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should.
Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously’. Apparently it’s like that. Your bid – for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity – will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.
Let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being “in Christ” or of Christ being “in them”, this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts–that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body.
There is something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefor, when it falls, a fiercer devil.
He thinks great folly, child,’ said Aslan. “This world is bursting with life for these few days because the song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air and rumbles in the ground. It will not be so for long. But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh, Adam’s son, how cleverly you defend yourself against all that might do you good!
Friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying “Holy, Holy, Holy” to one another (Isaiah VI, 3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have.
If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side‚Äôs battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and from the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official “Unselfishness” of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.
Christianity is not a patent medicine. Christianity claims to give an account of facts – to tell you what the real universe is like. Its account of the universe may be true, or it may not, and once the question is really before you, then your natural inquisitiveness must make you want to know the answer. If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.
The action of Pity leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It changes darkness into light and evil into good. But it will not, at the cunning tears of Hell, impose on good the tyranny of evil. Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world’s garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses.
[Milton’s] argument is (a) St. Augustine was wrong in thinking God’s only purpose in giving Adam a female, instead of a male, companion, was copulation. For (b) there is a “peculiar comfort” in the society of man and woman “beside, (i.e. in addition to, apart from) the genial bed”; and (c) we know from Scripture that something analogous to “play” or “slackening the cords” occurs even in God. That is why the Song of Songs describes a thousand raptures…far on the hither side of carnal enjoyment.
The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents–or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.
I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.
Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.
We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility.
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‚Äòthe veil of familiarity.‚Äô The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story‚Ä¶by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.
Stop it,” spluttered Eustace, “go away. Put that thing away. It’s not safe. Stop it, I say. I’ll tell Caspian. I’ll have you muzzled and tied up.” “Why do you not draw your own sword, poltroon!” cheeped the Mouse. “Draw and fight or I’ll beat you black and blue with the flat.” “I haven’t got one,” said Eustace. “I’m a pacifist. I don’t believe in fighting.” “Do I understand,” said Reepicheep, withdrawing his sword for a moment and speaking very sternly, “that you do not intend to give me satisfaction?
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.
God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.
What is your view of the daily discipline of the Christian life – the need for taking time to be alone with God? Lewis: “We have our New Testament regimental orders upon the subject. I would take it for granted that everyone who becomes a Christian would undertake this practice. It is enjoined upon us by Our Lord; and since they are his commands, I believe in following them. It is always just possible that Jesus Christ meant what he said when He told us to seek the secret place and to close the door.
If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely ‘conditions’. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds- making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.
Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.
If God ‘foresaw’ our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose god is outside and above the Time-line… You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He know your tomorrow’s actions in just the same way–because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but the moment at which you have done it is already ‘NOW’ for Him.
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens – at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it — made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.
What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about ‘Man taking charge of his own destiny’. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?
I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling action after action had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an harrow to the string then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead through to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once now so many culs de sac.
I can answer that only by hearsay, returned the Guide, for pain is a secret which he has shared with your race and not with mine; and you would find it as hard to explain suffering to me as I would find it to reveal to you the secrets of the Mountain people. But those who know best say this, that any liberal man would choose the pain of this desire, even for ever, rather than the peace of feeling it no longer; and that though the best thing is to have, the next best is to want, and the worst of all is not to want.
When the police arrived and found no lion, no broken wall, and no convicts, and the Head behaving like a lunatic, there was an inquiry into the whole thing. And in the inquiry all sorts of things about Experiment House came out, and about ten people got expelled. After that, the Head’s friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn’t much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.
…here also forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or bullying. But if that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. (This doesn’t mean that you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart – every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out.)
Puddleglum,’ they’ve said, ‘You’re altogether too full of bobance and bounce and high spirits. You’ve got to learn that life isn’t all fricasseed frogs and ell pie. You want something to sober you down a bit. We’re only saying it for your own good, Puddleglum.’ That’s what they say. Now a job like this –a journey up north just as winter’s beginning looking for a prince that probably isn’t there, by way of ruined city nobody’s ever seen– will be just the thing. If that doesn’t steady a chap, I don’t know what will.
Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature-not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant….As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.
A faith in culture is as bad as a faith in religion; both expressions imply a turning away from those very things which culture and religion are about. Culture as a collective name for certain very valuable activities is a permissible word; but culture hypostatized, set up on its own, made into a faith, a cause, a banner, a platform, is unendurable. For none of the activities in question cares a straw for that faith or cause. It is like a return to early Semitic religion where names themselves were regarded as powers.
Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains [heaven]. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak. What is a Lizard compared with a stallion? Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.
Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable. So that what seems the ugly doctrine is one that comforts and strengthens you in the end. The people who try to hold an optimistic view of this world would become pessimists: the people who hold a pretty stern view of it become optimistic.
We must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear, but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame, or struck dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations.
Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side. You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to “know of the doctrine.” All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be brought into harmony with universal Spirit. For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.
The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
To forgive the incessant provocations of daily life – to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son – how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night, ‚ÄúForgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.‚Äù We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God‚Äôs mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what he says.
You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to him employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which h allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.
Theology is like a map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God–experiences compared with which many thrills of pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further you must use the map.
In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets… Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” For in this love “to divide is not to take away.
I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic…In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks. … And suddenly, at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as though the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier.
Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is took weak and fuddled to shake off.
Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here’s the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person – and he would not need it.
The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or ‚Äî if they think there is not ‚Äî at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.
Now we cannot…discover our failure to keep God’s law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going tobring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this. I can’t.
Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don’t go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don’t try to get there at all. It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it. And don’t talk too much about it even among yourselves. And don’t mention it to anyone else unless you find that they’ve had adventures of the same sort themselves. What’s that? How will you know? Oh, you’ll know all right. Odd things, they say-even their looks-will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open. Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools.” -The Profesor
It’s no use telling us that something was ‘mysterious’ or ‘loathsome’ or ‘awe-inspiring’ or ‘voluptuous.’ By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim, ‘how mysterious!’ or ‘loathsome’ or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you’ll have no need to tell me how I should react.
But what would have been the good?” Aslan said nothing. “You mean,” said Lucy rather faintly, “that it would have turned out all right ‚Äì somehow? But how? Please, Aslan! Am I not to know?” “To know what would have happened, child?” said Aslan. “No. Nobody is ever told that.” “Oh dear,” said Lucy. “But anyone can find out what will happen,” said Aslan. “If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me ‚Äì what will happen? There is only one way of finding out.
Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well, and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing–rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.
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.
The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question “Do you see the same truth?” would be “I see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,” no Friendship can arise – though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.
It is usual to speak in a playfully apologetic tone about one’s adult enjoyment of what are called ‘children’s books.’ I think the convention a silly one. No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty-except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all. A mature palate will probably not much care for cr√®me de menthe: but it ought still to enjoy bread and butter and honey.
[M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic” or “practical,” “outworn” or “contemporary,” “conventional” or “ruthless.” Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous‚Äîthat it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.
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‚Ä¶ Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.
If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love – You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.
It is no disparagement to the garden to say it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns…It will remain a garden only if someone does all these things to it…If you want to see the difference between [the garden’s] contribution and the gardener’s, put the commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes rakes, shears, and a packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy, and fecundity beside dead, steril things. Just so, our ‘decency and common sense’ show grey and deathlike beside the geniality of love.
You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong – only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,and what came through them was longing. These things‚Äîthe beauty, the memory of our own past‚Äîare good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty ‚Äì of want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed goal in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence, and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense , His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give, and nothing to receive.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously – no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.
The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love”, and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. “Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest “well pleased”.
I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do enter your room, you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling.
But if you are a poor creature–poisoned by a wretched up-bringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels–saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion–nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends–do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day He will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all – not least yourself.
Honest rejection of Christ, however mistaken, will be forgiven and healed … but to evade the Son of Man, to look the other way, to pretend you haven’t noticed, to become suddenly absorbed in something on the other side of the street, to leave the receiver off the telephone because it might be He who was ringing up, to leave unopened certain letters in a strange handwriting because they might be from Him — this is a different matter. You may not be certain yet whether you ought to be a Christian; but you do know you ought to be a Man, not an ostrich, hiding its head in the sand.
I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool; you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.
We are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that the mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man’s love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.
In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish.The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers-or should I say, nurses?-will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us.
Temperance referred not abstaining, but going the right length and no further…of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or any Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he wants to give the money to the poor, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying.
The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their Mother and from the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far the East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus.
After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us toward is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.

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About C. S. Lewis

Quotes by C. S. Lewis