~ C. S. Lewis Quotes ~

[MysteRy]

A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere--'Bibles laid open millions of surprises ' as Herbert says 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is if I may say it very unscrupulous.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.'

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

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.

[MysteRy]

Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' 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. 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.

[MysteRy]

Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may 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.