Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
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.
The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not.
If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.
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.
The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)…
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
Aslan: You doubt your value. Don’t run from who you are.
You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.
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.
All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.
We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely
[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.
She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.
Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.
Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
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.
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
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.
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.
He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.
Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.
We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.
Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.
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.
He’s not safe, but he’s good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)
[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.
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.
God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.
He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.
I seemed to hear God saying, “Put down your gun and we’ll talk.
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?
They call him Aslan in That Place,” said Eustace.”What a curious name!””Not half so curious as himself,” said Eustace solemnly.
God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
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?
Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.
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 ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.
Then Hwin, though shaking all over, gave a strange little neigh and trotted across to the Lion. “Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
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.
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.
Even if there were pains in Heaven, all who understand would desire them.
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.
Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector.
Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.
The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.
If there is a wasp in the room, I’d like to be able to see it.
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]
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
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…
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.
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?
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.
Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.
Once very near the end I said, ‘If you can — if it is allowed — come to me when I too am on my death bed.’ ‘Allowed!’ she said. ‘Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.
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?
The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.
How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me. Poi si torno all’ eterna fontana.
[Death] is a safety-device because, once Man has fallen, natural immortality would be the one utterly hopeless destiny for him.
But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history — that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires.
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.
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?
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.
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.
All that we call human history–money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery–[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
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?
Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.
I believe this not in the sense that it is part of my creed, but in the sense that it is one of my opinions. My religion would not be in ruins if this opinion were shown to be false.
The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of the marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.
The Prayer that precedes all other prayer is, may the real me meet the real you.
I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.
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.
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…
You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” said the Lion.
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!
Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.
But very quickly they all became grave again: for, as you know, there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects–with their Christianity latent.
Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.
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.
A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.
By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
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.
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.
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.
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity
As long as the postponement lasts he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent.
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.
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
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.
A clever schoolboy’s reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.
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.
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.
We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
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’t touch and see.
A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.
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 and beyond.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.
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.
It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it – and that to my mind is one of the best tests.
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.
If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.
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.
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
What lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.
Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation bywhich a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. – Screwtape
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.
Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
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.
People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.
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.
The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one!
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too?
Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends – comrades – do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…
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.
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.
Don’t you think a dream would feel shy if it were seen walking about in the waking world?
And the worst thing about it was that you began to feel as if you had always lived on that ship, in that darkness, and to wonder whether sun and blue skies and wind and birds had not been only a dream.
The truth is, he was so glad at being free from his long enchantment that all dangers seemed a game in comparison. But the rest found it an eerie journey.
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike.
We are a little land. And little lands on the borders of a great empire were always hateful to the lords of the great empire. He longs to blot them out, gobble them up.
And he had been very badly treated by a girl too. He had thought her a really civilised and adult personality, and then she had unexpectedly revealed that she was a mass of bourgeois prejudices and monogamic instincts.
Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour 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.
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 didn’t 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’t recommend Christianity.
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don’t agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ
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”.
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.
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.
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.
We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We happen to have a body.
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.
You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house.
Don’t think of God in terms of forms, because forms are limited and God is unlimited.
The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking “But I never knew before. I never dreamed….” I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, “It reminds me of straw.
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.
The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty.
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.
You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues.
It must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom’s specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery.
God’s presence is not the same as the feeling of God’s presence and He may be doing most for us when we think He is doing least.
The trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges your letters and so in time you come to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got his address wrong.
Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.
Authority, reason, experience; on these three, mixed in varying proportions all our knowledge depends.
We…advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche.
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. As if the Good Lord had nothing better to do than exist!
Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion.
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.
That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.
We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading.
The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop.
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.
Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied.
The man can neither make, 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.
Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased.
Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper throughs than anyone else.
…true wisdom is the skill and practice of death.
I could mend my soul no more than my face. Unless the gods helped. And why did the gods not help?
How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
Are the gods not just?’ ‘Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?
It is the gods who have been accused. They have answered her. If they in turn accuse her, a greater judge and a more excellent court must try the case.
You’re a tree in whose shadow we can’t thrive. We want to be our own.
We’d rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.
Once you have made the world an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.
We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique.
Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them.
As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance.
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.
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.
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.
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.
Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.
Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops.
The nearest thing we have to a defence against [the gods] (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one.
If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.
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 “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.
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.
And this new air was so delicious, and all his old life seemed so far away, that he forgot for a moment about his bruises and his aching muscles.
It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. 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 possibility of pain is inherent in the very existence of a world where souls can meet.
The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.
Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.
They were making a riotous noise, but it was much more like music – rather advanced music which you don’t quite take in at the first hearing – than birds’ songs ever are in our world.
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.
The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
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.
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’s whole structure away.
I did wonder if there really was such a person as Aslan: but then sometimes I wondered if there were really people like you. Yet there you are.
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 homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.
The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose, and that is to support the ultimate career.
I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids.
In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.
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.
Damsel,” said the Prince, bowing to her. “You are of a high courage, and therefore, I doubt not, you come of a noble blood in your own world.
And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.
All joy… emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
Fun is closely related to Joy — a sort of emotional froth arising from the play of instinct.
The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.
I believe it all. If I seem not to, it is only that my joy is too great to let my belief settle itself.
Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.
For the entrance is low: we must stoop till we are no taller than children to get in.
I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn’t anyone?
Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.
I gather they are even vaguely pacifist, not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of purely fashionable and literary communism.
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary
Though under earth, and throneless now I beYet while I lived all earth was under me.
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.
The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.
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.
You are never too old to set a new goal or to dream a new dream.
Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future.
What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other.
The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.
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.
Lewis encourages his cancer-stricken and temporarily depressed wife that uncertainty rather than hopelessness is our cross.
For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.
For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.
A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.
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.
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.
There was no sudden, striking, and emotional transition. Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight. When you first notice them they have already been going on for some time.
When I was at school one would have said, ‘I swear by the Bible.’ But Bibles were not encouraged at Experiment House.
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.
If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo.
Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this.
Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared.
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.
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.
Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile?
God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.
And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job–where the machine seems to run on much as usual–I loath the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.
Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.
You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.
To me, re-reading my favorite books is like spending time with my best friends.I’d never be satisfied to limit myself to just one experience each with my favorite people.
The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.
Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little 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.
By remembering it too often I have blurred the memory itself.
You are speaking…as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing… what you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure.
Well sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time”Are they?
It is dull, Son of Adam, to drink without eating,” said the Queen presently. “What would you like best to eat?””Turkish Delight, please, your Majesty,” said Edmund.
But who is Aslan? Do you know him?””Well-he knows me,” said Edmund. “He is the great Lion, the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, who saved me and saved Narnia.
When Adam ate the irrevocable apple, ThouSaw’st beyond death the resurrection of the dead
The master demon Screwtape identifies elitist humanity’s tendency toward “an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men.
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.
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure.
O my mistress, do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune but all the dead are dead alike!
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward towards success.
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.
One of the drawbacks about adventures is that when you come to the most beautiful places you are often too anxious and hurried to appreciate them.
It may be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies.
Every story of conversion is a story of blessed defeat.
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.
[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.
When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him.
I felt sure that [Oyarsa] was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed.
To generalize is to be an idiot,” said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage.
In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.
Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones–bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas.
Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about.
Feelings come and go, and when they come a good use can be made of them, but they cannot be our regular spiritual diet.
We appear to be saying something very important aboutsomething: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.
When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less.
Man is now a horror to God and 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.
Man is to be understood only in his relation to God.
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.
But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.
We had better share our bewilderments. By hiding them from each other we should not hide them from ourselves.
Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.
And not wretched sausages half full of bread and soya bean either, but real meaty, spicy ones, fat and piping hot and burst and just the tiniest bit burnt.
The Order of the Divine mind, embodied in the Divine Law, is beautiful. What should a man do but try to reproduce it, so far as possible, in his daily life?
The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.
It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of te chest beneath that makes them seem so.
God has given to His works His own character of emeth; they are watertight, faithful, reliable, not at all vague or phantasmal.
Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. 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…
That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.
One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters.
Justice shall be mixed with mercy. You shall not always be an Ass.
Take from a man his freedom or his goods and you may have taken his innocence, almost his humanity, as well.
… You must always remember… Whatever their bodies do affects their souls.
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.
Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.
As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.
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.
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.
. . . the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, praised most, while the crank, misfits and malcontents praised least.
It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.
For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.
But of course these conjectures as to why God does what He does are probably of no more value than my dog’s ideas of what I am up to when I sit and read.
I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything.
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.
When you painted on earth – at least in your earlier days – it was because you caught glimpses of heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too.
I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began
I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there’s any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.
Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.
It is not trying that is ever going to bring 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.
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.
Although he didn’t care much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks (grades or comparisons).
We love and reason because God Loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.
I suspect there is something in our very mode of thought which makes it inevitable that we should always be baffled by actual existence, whatever character actual existence may have.
You see, I don’t think age matters so much as people think. Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts were already 50 when I was 12….
I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.
Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.
The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.
The author says the mark of a true rest your creature is an inability to be still without a kind of resignation.
If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.
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.
I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you.
The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty…
… Of his sins [Heavenly Father] does not want [man] to think [on them] too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better [Heavenly Father] is pleased.
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.
How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask-half our great theological and metaphysical problems-are like that.
Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
The Marxist thus finds himself in real agreement with the Christian in those two beliefs which Christianity paradoxically demands – that poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed.
…if you give such a creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains: but there is no co-ordinating self which can recognise that ‘I have had two pains’.
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.
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,…Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.
I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but impossibilities,
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,
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.
No time for better words, no time to unsay anything.-Til We Have Faces
If you are foe, we do not fear you. If you are friend, your foes will be taught the fear of us.
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.
Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which grow up ten years later into domestic hatred.
We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts
Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.
The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.
Envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you’, is the hotbed of Fascism.
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.
She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age.
We all want progress, but if you are 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.
Have you no idea of progress, of development?””I have seen them both in an egg,” said Caspian. “We call it ‘Going Bad’ in Narnia
How well it was said,” answered the fisherman, “that swords can be kept off with shields but the Eye of Wisdom pierces through every defense!
It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
No net less wide than a man’s whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish.
A simpler form of the same objection consists in saying that death ought not to be final, that there ought to be a second chance. I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given.
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.
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.
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.
It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.
Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description.
Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you. What are you afraid of? Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret?
There is no excess of goodness. You cannot go too far in the right direction.
We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love.
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 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.
He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.
That’s all YOU know,’ said Digory. ‘It’s because you’re a girl. Girls never want to know anything but gossip and rot about people getting engaged.
The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics.
The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.
And certainly both Horses were doing, if not all they could, all they thought they could; which is not quite the same thing.
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.
Of course, there is no conceivable way of getting by reason from the proposition “I am losing interest in this” to the proposition “This is false.
Christianity does NOT replace the technical. When he tells you to feed the hungry and doesn’t give you lessons in cookery. If you want to learn THAT, you must go to a cook rather than a Christian.
Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.
It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.
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.
When we carry out our “religious duties” we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last water comes, it may find them ready.
I was not born to be free—I was born to adore and obey.
the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.
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.
As someone has said “gods” is not really the plural of God; God has no plural.
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.
…some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do.
You are never to old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
People shouldn’t call for demons unless they really mean what they say.
Have fun, even if it’s not the same kind of fun everyone else is having.
All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me.
What worried him worst at the moment – for it is often little things that are hardest to stand – was that his lip was bleeding where they had hit him and he couldn’t wipe the little trickle of blood away although it tickled him.
Daughter,” said the Hermit, “I have now lived a hundred and nine winters in this world and have never met any such thing as Luck.
While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is the best.
When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.
That was what it felt like – as if one had always been in that place and never been bored although nothing had ever happened.
When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was — gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.
Lead us not into temptation’ often means, among other things, ‘Deny me those gratifying invitations, those highly interesting contacts, that participation in the brilliant movements of our age, which I so often, at such risk, de
When Jill woke next morning and found herself in a cave, she thought for one horrid moment that she was back in the Underworld.
We call bad one who rejects the fruit he is given for the fruit he is expecting or the fruit he was given last time.
On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.
…You won’t get eternal life by just feeling the presence of God in flowers or music.
I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.
Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles.
Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.
Faster and faster they raced, but no one got hot or tired or out of breath.
We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot benaturally loved.
I do love that tune – but really, I must go home. I only meant to stay for a few minutes.
One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.
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.
You all know,” said the Guide, “that security is mortals’ greatest enemy.
Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.
You invaded Narnia. You have no more right leading than Miraz does. Peter Pevensie: You, him, your father! Narnia’s better off without the lot of you!
Oh-my-Father-and-oh-the-delight-of-my-eyes,” began the young man, muttering the words very quickly and sulkily and not at all as if the Tisroc were the delight of his eyes.
The human mind is generally farmore eager to praise and dispraise than to describe anddefine.
Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.
The great art of life is to moderate our passions. Objects of affection are like other belongings. We must love them enough to enrich our lives while we have them, not enough to impoverish our lives when they are gone.
Now it is time!” then louder, “Time!”; and then so loud it could have shaken the stars; “TIME.” The door flew open.
Let’s pray that the human race never escapes Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
I do wish,” said Lucy, “now that we’re not thirsty, we could go on feeling as not-hungry as we did when we were thirsty.
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 every having noticed it.
The proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator—to 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.
To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series – the plot, as we call it – is only really a new whereby to catch something else.