Browsing Quotes By C.S. Lewis, page 1
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There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot because our charitable expenditure excludes them
Speaker: C.S. LewisSource: twitter postPosted: 11 Nov 2011 at 9:53 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It is not your business to succeed, but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God.
Speaker: C.S. LewisSource: twitter postPosted: 11 Nov 2011 at 9:50 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 24 Apr 2011 at 11:32 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.”
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 24 Apr 2011 at 11:32 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.”
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 24 Apr 2011 at 11:29 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to be all about mortality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Everyone there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.”
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 21 Apr 2011 at 2:13 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.”
Speaker: C.S. LewisSource: Mere ChristianityPosted: 22 Jul 2010 at 2:10 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There are no ordinary people. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 18 Mar 2009 at 8:58 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:42 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:42 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective ‘unchanged’ we have substituted the emotional adjective ‘stagnant.’ 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.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:41 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by the Enemy, not to inform men, but to remind them, to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them. We make the Sophists: He raises up a Socrates to answer them.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:40 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies – those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are rejected at the pleasure of Another!
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:39 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Men are not angered my 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 more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Like most of the other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peace, it [love] is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:36 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a joke.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:36 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
We always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is the least natural, least redolent of its maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula… To get the man’s soul and five him nothing in return – that is what really gladdens Our Father’s heart.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!