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.
¶ "Answers to Questions on Christianity"
Quotations by ...
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods, and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.
¶ "Learning in War-Time"
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, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
¶ "On Forgiveness"
We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who are the minor characters. The Author knows. ... But we, never seeing the play from the outside, ... cannot tell at what moment the end ought to come. That it will come when it ought, we may be sure. ... That it has a meaning we may be sure, but we cannot see it. When it is over, we may be told. We are led to expect that the Author will have something to say to each of us who has played. The playing it well is what matters infinitely.
¶ "The World's Last Night"
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
¶ (Attributed)
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.
¶ (Attributed)
The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.
¶ (Attributed)
My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not now either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening towards active assistance, is simply bad.
¶ (Attributed)
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
¶ (Attributed)
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
¶ (Attributed)
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
¶ (Attributed)
There seems no plan because it's all plan. There seems no center because it's all center.
¶ (Attributed)
We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.
¶ (Attributed)
Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
¶ (Attributed)
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.
¶ (Attributed)
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely 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 own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
¶ (Attributed)
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.
¶ (Attributed)
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. Nothing will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--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.
¶ A Grief Observed
What do people mean when they say, "I am not afraid of God because I know He is good"? Have they never been to a dentist?
¶ A Grief Observed (1961)
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."
¶ A Grief Observed, ch. 1
Good and evil both increase at compound interest.
¶ Christian Behavior
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.
¶ God in the Dock
I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands "Thus saith the Lord," it lies, and lies dangerously.
¶ God in the Dock, "Is Progress Possible?" (1958)
Indeed, in so far as things unseen are manifested by the things seen, one might from one point of view call the whole material universe an allegory.
¶ Letters of C.S. Lewis (10 Dec. 1956)
Well, let's go on disagreeing but don't let us judge. What doesn't suit us may suit possible converts of a different type. My model here is the behaviour of the congregation at a 'Russian Orthodox' service, where some sit, … some stand, some kneel, some walk about, and no one takes the slightest notice of what anyone else is doing. That is good sense, good manners, and good Christianity. 'Mind one's own business' is a good rule in religion as in other things.
¶ Letters of C.S. Lewis (13 Mar. 1956)
Apologetic work is so dangerous to one's faith. A doctrine never seems dimmer to me than when I have just successfully defended it.
¶ Letters of C.S. Lewis (2 Aug. 1946)
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.
¶ Letters of C.S. Lewis (29 Apr. 1959)
God loves us; not because we are loveable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but because He delights to give.
¶ Letters of C.S. Lewis (undated)
Suppose I pray that you may be given grace to withstand your besetting sin (short list of candidates for this post will be forwarded on demand). Well, all the work has to be done by God and you. If I pray against my own besetting sin there will be work for me. One sometimes fights shy of admitting an act to be a sin for this very reason
¶ Letters to Malcolm
I have called my material surroundings a stage set. In this I can act. And you may well say "act". For what I call "myself" (for all practical, everyday purposes) is also a dramatic construction; memories, glimpses in the shavinglass, and snatches of the very fallible activity called "introspection", are the principal ingredients. Normally I call this construction "me"' and the stage set "the real world". ... I cannot, in the flesh, leave the stage, either to go behind the scenes or to take my seat in the pit; but I can remember that these regions exist.
¶ Letters to Malcolm
And I also remember that my apparent self -- this clown or hero or super -- under his grease-paint is a real person with an off-stage life. The dramatic person could not tread the stage unless he concealed a real person: unless the real and unknown I existed, I would not even make mistakes about the imagined me. And in prayer this real I struggles to speak, for once, from his real being, and to address, for once, not the other actors, but -- what shall I call Him? The Author, for He invented us all? The Producer, for He controls all? Or the Audience, for He watches, and will judge, the performance?
¶ Letters to Malcolm
We should never ask of anything "Is it real?," for everything is real. The proper question is "A real what?," e.g., a real snake or real delirium tremens?
¶ Letters to Malcolm, ch. 15
Humans are very seldom either totally sincere or totally hypocritical. Their moods change, their motives are mixed, and they are often themselves quite mistaken as to what their motives are.
¶ Letters to an American Lady (28 Mar. 1961)
May God's grace give you the necessary humility. Try not to think — much less speak — of their sins. One's own are a much more profitable theme! And if on consideration, one can find no faults on one's own side, then cry for mercy: for this must be a most dangerous delusion.
¶ Letters to an American Lady (9 Jan. 1961)
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.
¶ Mere Christianity, Bk. III, ch. 10
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.
¶ Mere Christianity, Bk. IV, ch. 7
Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses. … And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.
¶ Miracles, ch. 1
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.
¶ Of Other Worlds (1952)
We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. "How he's grown!" we exclaim, "How time flies!" as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.
¶ Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 12
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 .…
¶ The Abolition of Man
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.
¶ The Abolition of Man, ch. 1
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 save 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 Four Loves
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.
¶ The Four Loves, ch. 4
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.
¶ The Great Divorce
There's 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.
¶ The Great Divorce
"Well," says the ghostly ex-cleric, "really, you know, I am not aware of a thirst for some ready-made truth which puts an end to intellectual activity in the way you seem to be describing. Will it leave me the free play of Mind, Dick? I must insist on that, you know."
"You have gone far wrong," Dick replies, "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"
¶ The Great Divorce
"Milton was right," said my Teacher. "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. There is always something they prefer to joy — that is, to reality. We see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends.
¶ The Great Divorce, ch. 9
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. To those who knock it is opened.
¶ The Great Divorce, ch. 9
There is something awfully nice about reading a book again, with all the half-unconscious memories it brings back.
¶ The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (16 Nov. 1915)
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." I know I am very fortunate in that respect.
¶ The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (29 Dec. 1935)
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.
¶ The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (30 May 1916)
The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
¶ The Magician's Nephew (1955)
What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.
¶ The Pilgrim's Regress, Bk. 7, Ch. 9
In some way, 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.
¶ The Problem of Pain (1940)
Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform.
¶ The Problem of Pain (1940)
[God] makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. 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.
¶ The Problem of Pain, ch. 10
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.