“If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions – if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before – then I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary.”
— C. S. Lewis
“If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“In your world, I have another name. You should know me by it.”
“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.”
“Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain.”
“The lost enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded.”
“The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.”
“Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.”
“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.”
“It takes courage to live through suffering; and it takes honesty to observe it.”
“To get even near humility, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.”
“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.”
“There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.”
“You do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but you have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
“Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly – are done worst when we try hardest to do them.”
“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.”
“They Open A Door And Enter A World.”
“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.”
“You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.”
“God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.”
“You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.”
“The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”
“You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.”
“Nothing is really ours until we share it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.”
“Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die.”
“Unsatisfied desire is in itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”
“All these toys were never intended to possess my heart. My true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ.”
“Narnia! It’s all in the wardrobe just like I told you!”
“The cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning!”
“Because God created the Natural – invented it out of His love and artistry – it demands our reverence.”
“But all night, Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes.”
“Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”
“With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.”
“The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.”
“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.”
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