C. S. Lewis
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.
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
The worst sins of men are spiritual. The Four Loves
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. --Mere Christianity
Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about man’s search for God. For me, they might as well talk about the mouse’s search for a cat.
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood become a matter of life and death to you.
Either the Bible will keep you away from sin, or sin will keep you away from the Bible.
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
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.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
"We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and
therefore starved for meditation and true friendship."
"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."
"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"
Life
“You will never know how much you believe something until it is a matter of life
and death.” “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.” – God in the Dock, page 52.
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. – The Problem of Pain
"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. . ." – Mere
Christianity
"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." – Surprised by Joy
I am trying here to prevent
anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm
ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to
be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. 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 the 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. He did not intend to. – Mere Christianity, pages 40-41.
Christianity, if false, is of
no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be
is moderately important.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to
the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
Eros will have naked
bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
Has this
world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better
things ahead than any we leave behind.
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.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself,
because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says
to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!"
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.
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.
The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle
slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without
signposts.
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."
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.
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
No Home Here The joys of Heaven are, for most of us in our present condition, "an acquired taste"--and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place. --The Problem of Pain
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.
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men and His compulsion is our liberation; --Surprised by Joy
From the Beginning 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." --Miracles
God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God--to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response--to be miserable--these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows--the only food that any possible universe ever can grow--then we must starve. --The Problem of Pain
First Things You can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first --God in the Dock
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. --Mere Christianity
Feelings come and go, and when they come a good use can be made of them: they cannot be our regular spiritual diet. --The World's Last Night and Other Essays
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.
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.
Man is now a horror to God and to himself and a creature ill-adapted to the universe not because God made him so but because he has made himself so by the abuse of his free will. --The Problem of Pain
When I first became a Christian, about fourteen years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and I wouldn't go to the churches and gospel halls . . .I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the great merit of it. I came up against different people of Quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren't fit to clean those boots. (1898-1963)
Resurrection shown in Narnia
"Son of Adam," said Aslan, "Go into that thicket and pluck the thorn that you will find there, and bring IT to me." Eustace obeyed. The thorn was a foot long and sharp as a rapier. "Drive it into my paw, Son of Adam," said Aslan, holding up his right fore-paw and spreading out the great pads towards Eustace.
"Must I?" said Eustace.
"Yes," said Aslan.
Then Eustace set his teeth and drove the thorn into Lion's pad. And there came out a great drop of blood redder than all redness that you have ever seen or imagined. And it splashed into the stream over the dead body of the King. At the same moment the doleful stopped. And the dead King began to be changed. . . . His eyes opened, and his lips both laughed, and suddenly he leaped up and stood before them. -The Silver Chair (The Chronicles of Narnia)
The New Testament does not envisage solitary religion; some kind of regular assembly for worship and instruction is everywhere taken for granted in the Epistles. So we must be regular practicing members of the church. Of course we differ in temperament. Some (like you-and me) find it more natural to approach God in solitude; but we must go to church as well. 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. (1898-1963)