C.S. Lewis

“Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”

“We know nothing of religion here: we only think of Christ.”

“You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.”

“You weren't a decent man and you didn't do your best. We none of us were and none of us did.”

“We are not living in a world where all roads are radii if a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision.”

“Give no poor fool the pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows.”

“I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do enter your room, you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling.”

“We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.”

“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.”

“Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you're making.”

“No one can say 'He jests at scars who never felt a wound' for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am that man.”

“1You said ‘The world is going back to Paganism’.Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the HouseSpill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn MusesTo pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.Hestia’s fire in every flat, rekindled, burned beforeThe Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient handsTended it. By the hearth the white-armd venerable motherDomum servabat, lanam faciebat. At the hourOf sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, graveBefore their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blushArose (it is the mark of freemen’s children) as they trooped,Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance.Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods,Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men,Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the agedIs wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to dieDefending the city in battle is a harmonious thing.Thus with magistral hand the Puritan SophrosuneCooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions;Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears …You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.2Or did you mean another kind of heathenry?Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.Over its icy bastions faces of giant and trollLook in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hopeTo be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and dieHis second, final death in good company. The stupid, strongUnteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaitsWho walked back into burning houses to die with men,Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitalsMade critical comments on its workmanship and aim.Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the eventYour goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).”

“Man is to be understood only in his relation to God.”

“There is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into ‘coteries’ where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumor that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other groups can say.”

“No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

“Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for.”

“Already the new men are dotted here and there all over the earth. Some, as I have admitted, are still hardly recognisable: but others can be recognised. Every now and then one meets them. Their very voices and faces are different from ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. They are, I say, recognisable; but you must know what to look for. They will not be very like the idea of ‘religious people’ which you have formed from your general reading. They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but they need you less. (We must get over wanting to be NEEDED: in some goodish people, specially women, that is the hardest of all temptations to resist.) They will usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it comes from. When you have recognised one of them, you will recognise the next one much more easily. And I strongly suspect (but how should I know?) that they recognise one another immediately and infallibly, across every barrier of colour, sex, class, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the very lowest, it must be great fun”

“The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour,or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.”

“If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.”

“For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary...”

“We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. They they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.”

“The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)”

“His hands had been reddened, as all men's hands have been, in the slaying before the foundation of the world; now, if he chose, he would dip them again in the same blood. 'Mercy,' he groaned...”

“The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with out friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”

“Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.”

“If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were educated. But a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

“Where Maleldil is, there is the centre. He is in every place. Not some of Him in one place and some in another, but in each place the whole Maleldil, even in the smallness beyond though. There is no way out of the centre save into the Bent Will which casts itself into the Nowhere. Blessed be He! Each thing was made for Him. He is the centre. Because we are with Him, each of us is at the centre...In His city all things are made for each. When He died in the Wonded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each mad had been the only man made, He would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest eldil, is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!”

“It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.”

“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.”

“When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you about the object: it only tells you about the speakers attitude to that object.”

“I perceived now that there is a love deeper than theirs who seek only the happiness of their beloved. Would a father see his daughter happy as a whore? Would a woman see her lover happy as a coward?”

“This is where men, even the trustiest, fail us. Their heart is never so wholly given to any matter but that some trifle of a meal, or a drink, or a sleep, or a joke, or a girl, may come in between them and it, and then (even if you are a queen) you'll get no more good out of them until they've had their way.”

“I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.”

“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.”

“I do love that tune - but really, I must go home. I only meant to stay for a few minutes.”

“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.”

“A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”

“The harder you tried not to think, the more you thought.”

“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.”

“One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.”

“What do they teach them at these schools?”

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

“If you find yourself with a desire that no experience in this world can satisfy, then the most probable explanation is that you were made for another world.”

“Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.”

“Do you think I care if Aslan dooms me to death?” said the King. “That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.”

“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.”

“Fellows of colleges do not always find money matters easy to understand: if they did, they would probably not have been the sort of men who become Fellows of colleges.”

“the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects, we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.”

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.”

“faith is the art of holding on to things in spite of your changing moods and circumstances.”