“The most intense joy, lies not in the having, but in the desire,Delight that never fades, bliss that is eternal,Is only your, when what you most desire, is just out of reach...Anthony Hopkins, from the movie Shadowlands, where he plays C.S. Lewis”
“Unattainability. The most intense joy lies not in the having, but inthe desiring. The delight that never fades, the bliss that is eternal,is only yours when what you most desire is just out of your reach.”
“He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.~C.S. Lewis~”
“I call it Joy. 'Animal-Land' was not imaginative. But certain other experiences were... The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult or find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?...Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse... withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased... In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else... The quality common to the three experiences... is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again... I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.”
“Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.Actually this quote doesn't sound like C.S. Lewis at all. Can anyone provide a source?”
“The two things that came out clearly were the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader.[C.S. Lewis writes to J.R.R. Tolkien on December 7, 1929]”
“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.”