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C. S. Lewis Quotes - Page 75

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Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the

Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature-not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant....As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden.

Happiness, Brother, Real

C. S. Lewis (1966). “Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse... Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil.

Thinking, Animal, Men

Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control.

Hero, Thinking, People

C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.99, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

Play, Scene, Concern

C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.100, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us.

Energy, Sin, Distortion

C. S. Lewis (2002). “Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer”, p.73, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to 'know of the doctrine'.

Father, Trying, Doctrine

C. S. Lewis (1966). “Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life”, p.236, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument...Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.

Wine, Play, Poison

The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe.

Self, Want, Natural

C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.109, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success.

Self, Vices, Feckless

Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.

Fashion, Men, Giving

C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

One flesh. Or if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends.

Journey, Wife, Gone

Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.

Deception, Nursery, Virtuous

C. S. Lewis (1990). “Poetry and prose in the sixteenth century”, Oxford Univ Pr on Demand

It's all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies - fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past.

Friendship, Sex, Past

Is it easy to love God' asks an old author. 'It is easy,' he replies, 'to those who do it.' I have included two Graces under the word Charity. But God can give a third. He can awake in man, towards Himself, a supernatural Appreciative love. This is of all gifts the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true centre of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible.

Lying, Men, Two

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

People, Sorting Out, Cards

C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature”, p.10, Cambridge University Press

Man has got to take charge of Man.... Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no 'take-it-or-leave-it' nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it'll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we'll get on to biochemical conditioning int he end and direct manipulation of the brain.

Education, Real, Mean

The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.

Animal, Past, Guiding Principles

Every object you see before you at this moment -the walls, ceiling, and furniture, the book, your own washed hands and cut fingernails, bears witness to the colonization of Nature of Reason.

Wall, Book, Cutting

If we continue to make moral judgements (and whatever we say shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of nature.

Believe, Men, Miracle

He wondered how he could ever have thought of the planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.

Reality, Islands, Air

I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.

Selling Things, Wish, Important

C. S. Lewis (2014). “Letters to an American Lady”, p.46, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Other than heaven, the only place where one's heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell.

Wisdom, Heart, Love Is

If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of 'religion.'

Wisdom, Burning, Holy Places

C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.211, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.

Mistake, Book, Mean

The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt - even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called.

Hurt, Thinking, Enemy

C. S. Lewis (2013). “Studies in Words”, p.122, Cambridge University Press

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