Browsing Quotes By C.S. Lewis, page 2
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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 with their stumbles… Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:34 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. 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.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:28 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
In civilized life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face.
...Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention… once this habit is well-established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offense is taken.Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones… You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who had been enchanted in the nursery by “stories from the Odyssey” buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing… and their lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore harder to tempt.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which hell affords.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:24 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground… by the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can forsee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life,” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real.”
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:23 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Nowadays even if you could write a prose like Traherne’s, you wouldn’t be allowed to, for the canon of ‘functionalism’ had disabled literature for half its functions.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:00 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Humor involves a sense of proportion and a power or seeing yourself from the outside.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:00 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!