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The Hills And Valleys Of Heaven Will Be To Those You Now Experience Not As A Copy Is To An Original, Nor As The Substitute Is To The Genuine Article, But As The Flower To The Root, Or The Diamond To The Coal.

-C. S. Lewis

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The Hills And Valleys

C. S. Lewis

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The Hills And Valleys Of Heaven Will Be To Those You Now Experience Not As A Copy Is To An Original, Nor As The Substitute Is To The Genuine Article, But As The Flower To The Root, Or The Diamond To The Coal.

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Spiteful Words Can Hurt Your Feelings But Silence Breaks Your Heart.

A God. The God. One Word Can Make All The Difference In The World.

When You Are Behaving As If You Loved Someone, You Will Presently Come To Love Him. If You Injure Someone You Dislike, You Will Find Yourself Disliking Him More. If You Do Him A Good Turn, You Will Find Yourself Disliking Him Less.

Finding Yourself

Devils Are Depicted With Bats' Wings And Good Angels With Birds' Wings, Not Because Anyone Holds That Moral Deterioration Would Be Likely To Turn Feathers Into Membrane, But Because Most Men Like Birds Better Than Bats.

And There’s Also ‘to Him That Hath Shall Be Given.’ After All, You Must Have A Capacity To Receive, Or Even Omnipotence Can’t Give. Perhaps Your Own Passion Temporarily Destroys The Capacity.

It Is Very True. But Even A Traitor May Mend. I Have Known One That Did.

You Can Get A Large Audience Together For A Strip-tease Act—that Is, To Watch A Girl Undress On The Stage. Now Suppose You Come To A Country Where You Could Fill A Theatre By Simply Bringing A Covered Plate On To The Stage And Then Slowly Lifting The Cover So As To Let Every One See, Just Before The Lights Went Out, That It Contained A Mutton Chop Or A Bit Of Bacon, Would You Not Think That In That Country Something Had Gone Wrong With The Appetite For Food?

Once In Our World, A Stable Had Something In It That Was Bigger Than Our Whole World.

Always Prefer The Plain Direct Word To The Long, Vague One.

We Do Not Want Merely To See Beauty... We Want Something Else Which Can Hardly Be Put Into Words- To Be United With The Beauty We See, To Pass Into It, To Receive It Into Ourselves, To Bathe In It, To Become Part Of It. That Is Why We Have Peopled Air And Earth And Water With Gods And Goddesses, And Nymphs And Elves.

I Wonder Do The Gods Know What It Feels Like To Be A Man.

If God 'foresaw' Our Acts, It Would Be Very Hard To Understand How We Could Be Free Not To Do Them. But Suppose God Is Outside And Above The Time-line... You Never Supposed That Your Actions At This Moment Were Any Less Free Because God Knows What You Are Doing. Well, He Know Your Tomorrow's Actions In Just The Same Way--because He Is Already In Tomorrow And Can Simply Watch You. In A Sense, He Does Not Know Your Action Till You Have Done It: But The Moment At Which You Have Done It Is Already 'now' For Him.

This Is My Endlessly Recurrent Temptation: To Go Down To That Sea, And There Neither Dive Nor Swim Nor Float, But Only Dabble And Splash, Careful Not To Get Out Of My Depth And Holding On To The Lifeline Which Connects Me With My Things Temporal.

Christianity Has Not Message For Those Who Do Not Realize They Are Sinners.

We Shall Draw Nearer To God, Not By Trying To Avoid The Sufferings Inherent In All Loves, But By Accepting Them And Offering Them To Him; Throwing Away All Defensive Armour. If Our Hearts Need To Be Broken, And If He Chooses This As The Way In Which They Should Break, So Be It.

If You Asked Twenty Good Men To-day What They Thought The Highest Of The Virtues, Nineteen Of Them Would Reply, Unselfishness. But If You Asked Almost Any Of The Great Christians Of Old He Would Have Replied, Love - You See What Has Happened? A Negative Term Has Been Substituted For A Positive, And This Is Of More Than Philological Importance. The Negative Ideal Of Unselfishness Carries With It The Suggestion Not Primarily Of Securing Good Things For Others, But Of Going Without Them Ourselves, As If Our Abstinence And Not Their Happiness Was The Important Point.

Her Face Was Working And Twitching With Passion, But His Looked Up At The Sky, Still Quiet, Neither Angry Nor Afraid, But A Little Sad.

God, Who Foresaw Your Tribulation, Has Specially Armed You To Go Through It, Not Without Pain But Without Stain.

Thus The Criminal Ceases To Be A Person, A Subject Of Rights And Duties, And Becomes Merely An Object On Which Society Can Work. And This Is, In Principle, How Hitler Treated The Jews. They Were Objects; Killed Not For Ill Desert But Because, On His Theories, They Were A Disease In Society. If Society Can Mend, Remake, And Unmake Men At Its Pleasure, Its Pleasure May, Of Course, Be Humane Or Homicidal. The Difference Is Important. But, Either Way, Rulers Have Become Owners.

God Became Man To Turn Creatures Into Sons: Not Simply To Produce Better Men Of The Old Kind But To Produce A New Kind Of Man. It Is Not Like Teaching A Horse To Jump Better And Better But Like Turning A Horse Into A Winged Creature.

While We Are Actually Subjected To Them, The 'moods' And 'spirits' Of Nature Point No Morals. Overwhelming Gaiety, Insupportable Grandeur, Sombre Desolation Are Flung At You. Make What You Can Of Them, If You Must Make At All. The Only Imperative That Nature Utters Is, 'look. Listen. Attend.

Try To Exclude The Possibility Of Suffering Which The Order Of Nature And The Existence Of Free-wills Involve, And You Find That You Have Excluded Life Itself

We Do Not Come To God As Bad People Trying To Become Good People; We Come As Rebels To Lay Down Our Arms.

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.

I Could Well Believe That It Is God's Intention, Since We Have Refused Milder Remedies, To Compel [christians] Into Unity, By Persecution Even. Satan Is Without Doubt Nothing Else Than A Hammer In The Hand Of A Benevolent And Severe God.

“who Are You?” One Who Has Waited Long For You To Speak.

We All Agree That Forgiveness Is A Beautiful Idea Until We Have To Practice It.

...the Sun Looks Down On Nothing Half So Good As A Household Laughing Together Over A Meal, Or Two Friends Talking Over A Pint Of Beer, Or A Man Alone Reading A Book That Interests Him..." - C.s. Lewis: Weight Of Glory

It's Like The Sound Of A Chuckle In The Darkness. The Sense That Some Shattering And Disarming Simplicity Is The Real Answer.

This Must Be A Simply Enormous Wardrobe!

Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe

Lion Witch Wardrobe

If Crime And Disease Are To Be Regarded As The Same Thing, It Follows That Any State Of Mind Which Our Masters Choose To Call 'disease' Can Be Treated As A Crime And Compulsorily Cured.

There Are A Dozen Views About Everything Until You Know The Answer. Then There's Never More Than One.

Perfect Humility Dispenses With Modesty.

We Must Lay Before Him What Is In Us; Not What Ought To Be In Us.

If We Discover A Desire Within Us That Nothing In This World Can Satisfy, Also We Should Begin To Wonder If Perhaps We Were Created For Another World.

Though We Cannot Experience Our Life As An Endless Present, We Are Eternal In God's Eyes; That Is, In Our Deepest Reality.

It May Be Hard For An Egg To Turn Into A Bird: It Would Be A Jolly Sight Harder For It To Learn To Fly While Remaining An Egg. We Are Like Eggs At Present. And You Cannot Go On Indefinitely Being Just An Ordinary, Decent Egg. We Must Be Hatched Or Go Bad.

The Christian Has A Great Advantage Over Other Men, Not By Being Less Fallen Than They, Nor Less Doomed To Live In A Fallen World, But By Knowing That He Is A Fallen Man In A Fallen World.

We Do Know That No Person Can Be Saved Except Through Christ. We Do Not Know That Only Those Who Know Him Can Be Saved By Him.

The Worst Attitude Of All Would Be The Professional Attitude Which Regards Children In The Lump As A Sort Of Raw Material Which We Have To Handle.

Pain Is G-d's Megaphone To Wake Up The World.

If You Think You Are Not Conceited, It Means You Are Very Conceited Indeed.

How Could An Idiotic Universe Have Produced Creatures Whose Mere Dreams Are So Much Stronger, Better, Subtler Than Itself?

Liking An Author May Be As Involuntary And Improbable As Falling In Love.

Falling In Love

For A Long Time I Used To Think This A Silly, Straw-splitting Distinction: How Could You Hate What A Man Did And Not Hate The Man? But Years Later It Occurred To Me That There Was One Man To Whom I Had Been Doing This All My Life - Namely Myself.

A Centaur Has A Man-stomach And A Horse-stomach. And Of Course Both Want Breakfast. So First Of All He Has Porridge And Pavenders And Kidneys And Bacon And Omlette And Cold Ham And Toast And Marmalade And Coffee And Beer. And After That He Tends To The Horse Part Of Himself By Grazing For An Hour Or So And Finishing Up With A Hot Mash, Some Oats, And A Bag Of Sugar. That's Why It's Such A Serious Thing To Ask A Centaur To Stay For The Weeekend. A Very Serious Thing Indeed.

Oh God, God, Why Did You Take Such Trouble To Force This Creature Out Of Its Shell If It Is Now Doomed To Crawl Back -- To Be Sucked Back -- Into It?

Now The Story Of Christ Is Simply A True Myth: A Myth Working On Us The Same Way As The Others, But With This Tremendous Difference That It Really Happened: And One Must Be Content To Accept It In The Same Way, Remembering That It Is God’s Myth Where The Others Are Men’s Myths: I.e., The Pagan Stories Are God Expressing Himself Through The Minds Of Poets, Using Such Images As He Found There, While Christianity Is God Expressing Himself Through What We Call 'real Things'.

God Will Look To Every Soul Like Its First Love Because He Is Its First Love.

It Is Always The Novice Who Exaggerates.

Screwtape Letters

That Will Not Be The Time For Choosing: It Will Be The Time When We Discover Which Side We Really Have Chosen, Whether We Realized It Before Or Not. Now, Today, This Moment, Is Out Chance To Chose The Right Side. God Is Holding Back To Give Us That Chance. It Will Not Last Forever. We Must Take It Or Leave It.

The Psalmists In Telling Everyone To Praise God Are Doing What All Men Do When They Speak Of What They Care About.

Besides Being Complicated, Reality, In My Experience, Is Usually Odd. It Is Not Neat, Not Obvious, Not What You Expect.

Always Winter But Never Christmas.

Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe

I Think He Made One Law Of That Kind In Order That There Might Be Obedience. In All These Other Matters What You Call Obeying Him Is But Doing What Seems Good In Your Own Eyes Also. Is Love Content With That?

Will The Others See You Too?" Asked Lucy. "certainly Not At First," Said Aslan. "later On, It Depends." "but They Won’t Believe Me!" Said Lucy. "it Doesn’t Matter.

Love, Having Become A God, Becomes A Demon.

It Is No Disparagement To The Garden To Say It Will Not Fence And Weed Itself, Nor Prune Its Own Fruit Trees, Nor Roll And Cut Its Own Lawns...it Will Remain A Garden Only If Someone Does All These Things To It...if You Want To See The Difference Between [the Garden's] Contribution And The Gardener's, Put The Commonest Weed It Grows Side By Side With His Hoes Rakes, Shears, And A Packet Of Weed Killer; You Have Put Beauty, Energy, And Fecundity Beside Dead, Steril Things. Just So, Our 'decency And Common Sense' Show Grey And Deathlike Beside The Geniality Of Love.

Got To Start By Finding It, Have We? Can't Start By Looking For It, I Suppose?

It Is Better To Forget About Yourself Altogether.

100 Per Cent Of Us Die, And The Percentage Cannot Be Increased.

Friendship Is Born At That Moment When A Single Particular Person Claims To A Different: 'what! You Far Too? I Assumed I Was The Only Real One Particular.

I Think God Wants Us To Love Him More, Not To Love Others Less.

Temperance Referred Not Abstaining, But Going The Right Length And No Further...of Course It May Be The Duty Of A Particular Christian, Or Any Christian, At A Particular Time, To Abstain From Strong Drink, Either Because He Is The Sort Of Man Who Cannot Drink At All Without Drinking Too Much, Or Because He Wants To Give The Money To The Poor, Or Because He Is With People Who Are Inclined To Drunkenness And Must Not Encourage Them By Drinking Himself. But The Whole Point He Is Abstaining, For A Good Reason, From Something He Does Not Condemn And Which He Likes To See Other People Enjoying.

The State Exists Simply To Promote And To Protect The Ordinary Happiness Of Human Beings In This Life. A Husband And Wife Chatting Over A Fire, A Couple Of Friends Having A Game Of Darts In A Pub, A Man Reading A Book In His Own Room Or Digging In His Own Garden-that Is What The State Is There For. And Unless They Are Helping To Increase And Prolong And Protect Such Moments, All The Laws, Parliaments, Armies, Courts, Police, Economics, Etc., Are Simply A Waste Of Time.

Well, Sir, If Things Are Real, They’re There All The Time." "are They?" Said The Professor; And Peter Did Not Quite Know What To Say.

At The End Of All Things, The Blessed Will Say, 'we Never Lived Anywhere But In Heaven.'

This World Is A Great Sculptor's Shop. We Are The Statues And There Is A Rumor Going Round The Shop That Some Of Us Are Some Day Going To Come To Life.

God Is, If I May Say It, Very Unscrupulous

Most People, If They Had Really Learned To Look Into Their Own Hearts, Would Know That They Do Want, And Want Acutely, Something That Cannot Be Had In This World. There Are All Sorts Of Things In This World That Offer To Give It To You, But They Never Quite Keep Their Promise.

Prayer Does Not Change God; It Changes Me.

You May Forget That You Are At Every Moment Totally Dependent On God.

The Very Nature Of Joy Makes Nonsense Of Our Common Distinction Between Having And Wanting.

Nothing, Not Even The Best And Noblest, Can Go On As It Now Is. Nothing, Not Even What Is Lowest And Most Bestial, Will Not Be Raised Again If It Submits To Death. It Is Sown A Natural Body, It Is Raised A Spiritual Body. Flesh And Blood Cannot Come To The Mountains [heaven]. Not Because They Are Too Rank, But Because They Are Too Weak. What Is A Lizard Compared With A Stallion? Lust Is A Poor, Weak, Whimpering Whispering Thing Compared With That Richness And Energy Of Desire Which Will Arise When Lust Has Been Killed.

When God Becomes A Man And Lives As A Creature Among His Own Creatures In Palestine, Then Indeed His Life Is One Of Supreme Self-sacrifice And Leads To Calvary.

We Must Get Over Wanting To Be Needed.

Till That Word Can Be Dug Out Of Us, Why Should They Hear The Babble That We Think We Mean? How Can They Meet Us Face To Face Till We Have Faces?

You Understand Sleep When You Are Awake, Not While You Are Sleeping. You Can See Mistakes In Arithmetic When Your Mind Is Working Properly; While You Are Making Them You Cannot See Them. Good People Know About Both Bad And Evil; Bad People Do Not Know About Either.

This Act [creation], As It Is For God, Must Always Remain Totally Inconceivable To Man. For We--even Our Poets And Musicians And Inventors--never, In The Ultimate Sense Make. We Only Build. We Always Have Materials To Build From. All We Can Know About The Act Of Creation Must Be Derived From What We Can Gather About The Relation Of The Creatures To Their Creator

Being In Love Is A Good Thing, But It Is Not The Best Thing. There Are Many Things Below It, But There Are Also Things Above It. You Cannot Make It The Basis Of A Whole Life. It Is A Noble Feeling, But It Is Still A Feeling. Now No Feeling Can Be Relied On To Last In Its Full Intensity, Or Even To Last At All. Knowledge Can Last, Principles Can Last, Habits Can Last; But Feelings Come And Go.

Aslan Is A Lion- The Lion, The Great Lion." "ooh" Said Susan. "i'd Thought He Was A Man. Is He-quite Safe? I Shall Feel Rather Nervous About Meeting A Lion"..."safe?" Said Mr Beaver ..."who Said Anything About Safe? 'course He Isn't Safe. But He's Good. He's The King, I Tell You.

I Believe, To Be Sure, That Any Man Who Reaches Heaven Will Find That What He Abandoned (even In Plucking Out His Right Eye) Has Not Been Lost: That The Kernel Of What He Was Really Seeking Even In His Most Depraved Wishes Will Be There, Beyond Expectation, Waiting For Him In 'the High Countries'.

Of Course All Children's Literature Is Not Fantastic, So All Fantastic Books Need Not Be Children's Books. It Is Still Possible, Even In An Age So Ferociously Anti-romantic As Our Own, To Write Fantastic Stories For Adults: Though You Will Usually Need To Have Made A Name In Some More Fashionable Kind Of Literature Before Anyone Will Publish Them.

On The Whole, God’s Love For Us Is A Much Safer Subject To Think About Than Our Love For Him.

To Every Soul, God Will Look Like Its First Love Because He Is Its First Love. Your Place In Heaven Will Seem To Be Made For You And You Alone, Because You Were Made For It - Made For It Stitch By Stitch As A Glove Is Made For A Hand.

Jewel,' He Said, 'what Lies Before Us? Horrible Thoughts Arise In My Heart. If We Had Died Before Today We Should Have Been Happy.

Goodness Is, So To Speak, Itself; Badness Is Only Spoiled Goodness. And There Must Be Something Good First Before It Can Be Spoiled.

Autumn Is Really The Best Of The Seasons; And I'm Not Sure That Old Age Isn't The Best Part Of Life.

I Write For The Unlearned About Things In Which I Am Unlearned Myself.

Omnipotence Means Power To Do All That Is Intrinsically Possible, Not To Do The Intrinsically Impossible. You May Attribute Miracles To Him, But Not Nonsense.

The Process Of Living Seems To Consist In Coming To Realize Truths So Ancient And Simple That, If Stated, They Sound Like Barren Platitudes.

Children Have One Kind Of Silliness, As You Know, And Grown-ups Have Another Kind.

Christ Says, 'give Me All. I Don't Want So Much Of Your Time And So Much Of Your Money And So Much Of Your Work: I Want You....hand Over The Whole Natural Self, All The Desires Which You Think Innocent As Well As The Ones You Think Wicked- The Whole Outfit. I Will Give You A New Self Instead. In Fact, I Will Give You Myself: My Own Will Shall Become Yours.

All That Are In Hell, Choose It. Without That Self-choice There Could Be No Hell.

It Is In Some Ways More Troublesome To Track And Swat An Evasive Wasp Than To Shoot, At Close Range, A Wild Elephant. But The Elephant Is More Troublesome If You Miss.

Where Men Are Forbidden To Honour A King, They Honor Millionaires, Athletes, Or Film Stars Instead; Even Famous Prostitutes Or Gangsters. For Spiritual Nature, Like Bodily Nature, Will Be Served; Deny It Food And It Will Gobble Poison.

When We Are Lost In The Woods, The Sight Of A Signpost Is A Great Matter.

There Are Only Two Kinds Of People In The End: Those Who Say To God, "thy Will Be Done," And Those To Whom God Says, In The End, "thy Will Be Done." All That Are In Hell, Choose It. Without That Self-choice There Could Be No Hell. No Soul That Seriously And Constantly Desires Joy Will Ever Miss It. Those Who Seek Find. Those Who Knock It Is Opened.

The Christian Is In A Different Position From Other People Who Are Trying To Be Good. They Hope, By Being Good, To Please God If There Is One; Or — If They Think There Is Not — At Least They Hope To Deserve Approval From Good Men. But The Christian Thinks Any Good He Does Comes From The Christ-life Inside Him. He Does Not Think God Will Love Us Because We Are Good, But That God Will Make Us Good Because He Loves Us; Just As The Roof Of A Greenhouse Does Not Attract The Sun Because It Is Bright, But Becomes Bright Because The Sun Shines On It.

And I Say Also This. I Do Not Think The Forest Would Be So Bright, Nor The Water So Warm, Nor Love So Sweet, If There Were No Danger In The Lakes.

Christianity Seems At First To Be All About Morality, 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. Every One 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.

Even If There Were Pains In Heaven, All Who Understand Would Desire Them.

Whenever We Find That Our Religious Life Is Making Us Feel That We Are Good - Above All, That We Are Better Than Someone Else - I Think We May Be Sure That We Are Being Acted On, Not By God, But By The Devil.

Man's Conquest Of Nature Turns Out, In The Moment Of Its Consummation, To Be Nature's Conquest Of Man.

If You Simply Try To Tell The Truth You Will, Nine Times Out Of Ten, Be Original Without Ever Having Noticed It.

Telling The Truth

At All Ages, If [fantasy And Myth] Is Used Well By The Author And Meets The Right Reader, It Has The Same Power: To Generalize While Remaining Concrete, To Present In Palpable Form Not Concepts Or Even Experiences But Whole Classes Of Experience, And To Throw Off Irrelevancies. Bat At Its Best It Can Do More; It Can Give Us Experiences We Have Never Had And Thus, Instead Of 'commenting On Life,' Can Add To It.

One Of The Most Dangerous Errors Is That Civilization Is Automatically Bound To Increase And Spread. The Lesson Of History Is The Opposite; Civilization Is A Rarity, Attained With Difficulty And Easily Lost. The Normal State Of Humanity Is Barbarism, Just As The Normal Surface Of The Planet Is Salt Water. Land Looms Large In Our Imagination And Civilization In History Books, Only Because Sea And Savagery Are To Us Less Interesting.

Even I Never Dreamed Of Magic Like This!

Good And Evil Both Increase At Compound Interest. That Is Why The Little Decisions You And I Make Every Day Are Of Such Infinite Importance. The Smallest Good Act Today Is The Capture Of A Strategic Point From Which, A Few Months Later, You May Be Able To Go On To Victories You Never Dreamed Of. An Apparently Trivial Indulgence In Lust Or Anger Today Is The Loss Of A Ridge Or Railway Line Or Bridgehead From Which The Enemy May Launch An Attack Otherwise Impossible.

I Can't Imagine A Man Really Enjoying A Book And Reading It Only Once.

My Idea Of God Is Not A Divine Idea. It Has To Be Shattered Time After Time. He Shatters It Himself.

The World Is So Much Larger Than I Thought. I Thought We Went Along Paths--but It Seems There Are No Paths. The Going Itself Is The Path.

One Always Feel Better When One Has Made Up One's Mind.

The People With Very Hard Problems Are Understood By God. He Knows What Wretched Machines They Are Trying To Drive. Some Day He Will Fling Them Away And Give Those People New Ones; Then They May Astonish Everyone, For They Learned Their Driving In A Hard School. Some Of The Last Will Be First And Some Of The First Will Be Last.

Because We Love Something Else More Than This World, We Love Even This World More Than Those Who Know No Other.

In Charn [jadis] Had Taken No Notice Of Polly (till The Very End) Because Digory Was The One She Wanted To Make Use Of. Now That She Had Uncle Andrew, She Took No Notice Of Digory. I Expect Most Witches Are Like That. They Are Not Interested In Things Or People Unless They Can Use Them; They Are Terribly Practical.

I Wrote This Story For You, But When I Began It I Had Not Realized That Girls Grow Quicker Than Books. As A Result You Are Already Too Old For Fairy Tales, And By The Time It Is Printed And Bound You Will Be Older Still. But Some Day You Will Be Old Enough To Start Reading Fairy Tales Again. You Can Then Take It Down From Some Upper Shelf, Dust It, And Tell Me What You Think Of It. I Shall Probably Be Too Deaf To Hear, And Too Old To Understand A Word You Say, But I Shall Still Be Your Affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.

It Doesn't Really Matter Whether You Grip The Arms Of The Dentist's Chair Or Let Your Hands Lie In Your Lap. The Drill Drills On.

A Thing May Be Morally Neutral And Yet The Desire For That Thing May Be Dangerous.

I Pray Because I Can't Help Myself. I Pray Because I'm Helpless. It Doesn't Change God - It Changes Me.

On Many Questions And Specially In View Of The Marriage Bed, The Puritans Were The Indulgent Party, . . . They Were Much More Chestertonian Than Their Adversaries. The Idea That A Puritan Was A Repressed And Repressive Person Would Have Astonished Sir Thomas More And Luther About Equally.

Being Nice Doesn’t Make You Stupid. It Makes You Feel Good Because You Know You Are Gracious Enough To Forgive And Smart Enough To Realize How Distasteful Some People Can Be.

All Your Life An Unattainable Ecstasy Has Hovered Just Beyond The Grasp Of Your Consciousness. The Day Is Coming When You Will Wake To Find, Beyond All Hope, That You Have Attained It, Or Else, That It Was Within Your Reach And You Have Lost It Forever.

He's Wild, You Know. Not Like A Tame Lion.

Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe

Is There A Difference Between A Man Who Thinks That Honesty Is The Best Policy, And An Honest Man?

If Our Deepest Desires Cannot Be Satisfied In This World, Then We Must Have Been Made For Another World.

Human Beings Look Separate Because You See Them Walking About Separately. But Then We Are So Made That We Can See Only The Present Moment. If We Could See The Past, Then Of Course It Would Look Different. For There Was A Time When Every Man Was Part Of His Mother, And (earlier Still) Part Of His Father As Well, And When They Were Part Of His Grandparents. If You Could See Humanity Spread Out In Time, As God Sees It, It Would Look Like One Single Growing Thing--rather Like A Very Complicated Tree. Every Individual Would Appear Connected With Every Other.

The Absent Are Easily Refuted.

The First Fact In The History Of Christendom Is A Number Of People Who Say They Have Seen The Resurrection.

I Sometimes Wonder Whether All Pleasures Are Not Substitutes For Joy.

Knock And It Shall Be Opened.' But Does Knocking Mean Hammering And Kicking The Door Like A Maniac?

We Have A Strange Illusion That Mere Time Cancels Sin. But Mere Time Does Nothing Either To The Fact Or To The Guilt Of A Sin.

The Full Acting Out Of The Self's Surrender To God Therefore Demands Pain: This Action, To Be Perfect, Must Be Done From The Pure Will To Obey, In The Absence, Or In The Teeth, Of Inclination

If You Don't Listen To Theology, That Won't Mean You Have No Ideas About God, It Will Mean You Have A Lot Of Wrong Ones.

The Worldly Man Treats Certain People Kindly Because He 'likes' Them: The Christian, Trying To Treat Every One Kindly, Finds Him Liking More And More People As He Goes On - Including People He Could Not Even Have Imagined Himself Liking At The Beginning.

Non-christians Seem To Think That The Incarnation Implies Some Particular Merit Or Excellence In Humanity. But Of Course It Implies Just The Reverse: A Particular Demerit And Depravity. No Creature That Deserved Redemption Would Need To Be Redeemed. They That Are Whole Need Not The Physician. Christ Died For Men Precisely Because Men Are Not Worth Dying For; To Make Them Worth It.

Meaningless Combinations Of Words Do Not Suddenly Acquire Meaning Simply Because We Prefix To Them The Two Other Words ' God Can'.

And I Was The Lion You Do Not Remember Who Pushed The Boat In Which You Lay, A Child Near Death, So That It Came To Shore Where A Man Sat, Wakeful At Midnight, To Receive You.

I Was Wondering — I Mean — Could There Be Some Mistake? Because Nobody Called Me And Scrubb, You Know. It Was We Who Asked To Come Here. You Would Not Have Called Me Unless I Had Been Calling You.

Telling Us To Obey Instinct Is Like Telling Us To Obey 'people.' People Say Different Things: So Do Instincts. Our Instincts Are At War... Each Instinct, If You Listen To It, Will Claim To Be Gratified At The Expense Of The Rest.

Most People Don't Need To Be Taught, They Need Only To Be Reminded

Heaven Will Display Far More Variety Than Hell.

Education Is Only The Most Fully Conscious Of The Channels Whereby Each Generation Influences The Next.

If One Could Run Without Getting Tired I Don't Think One Would Often Want To Do Anything Else.

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.

Make Your Choice, Adventurous Stranger, Strike The Bell And Bide The Danger, Or Wonder, Till It Drives You Mad, What Would Have Followed If You Had.

We Have Discovered That The Scheme Of 'outlawing War' Has Made War More Like An Outlaw Without Making It Less Frequent And That To Banish The Knight Does Not Alleviate The Suffering Of The Peasant.

Many Things, Such As Loving, Going To Sleep, Or Behaving Unaffectedly - Are Done Worst When We Try Hardest To Do Them.

A Man Who Was Merely A Man And Said The Sort Of Things Jesus Said Wouldn't Be A Great Moral Teacher. He'd Be Either A Lunatic On A Level With A Man Who Says He's A Poached Egg Or Else He'd Be The Devil Of Hell. You Must Make Your Choice. Either This Man Was, And Is, The Son Of God, Or Else A Madman Or Something Worse.

Love Is Unselfishly Choosing For Another's Highest Good.

Relationship Advice

Better To Be Miserable With Her Than Happy Without Her. Let Our Hearts Break Provided They Break Together. If The Voice Within Us Does Not Say This It Is Not The Voice Of Eros.

If One Is Only To Talk From First-hand Experience, Conversation Would Be A Very Poor Business.

If The Universe Is So Bad...how On Earth Did Human Beings Ever Come To Attribute It To The Activity Of A Wise And Good Creator?

Be Sure That The Ins And Outs Of Your Individuality Are No Mystery To Him; And One Day They Will No Longer Be A Mystery To You.

Either The Day Must Come When Joy Prevails And All The Makers Of Misery Are No Longer Able To Infect It, Or Else, For Ever And Ever, The Makers Of Misery Can Destroy In Others The Happiness They Reject For Themselves.

But If You Are A Poor Creature--poisoned By A Wretched Up-bringing In Some House Full Of Vulgar Jealousies And Senseless Quarrels--saddled, By No Choice Of Your Own, With Some Loathsome Sexual Perversion--nagged Day In And Day Out By An Inferiority Complex That Makes You Snap At Your Best Friends--do Not Despair. He Knows All About It. You Are One Of The Poor Whom He Blessed. He Knows What A Wretched Machine You Are Trying To Drive. Keep On. Do What You Can. One Day He Will Fling It On The Scrap-heap And Give You A New One. And Then You May Astonish Us All - Not Least Yourself.

We Make Men Without Chests And Expect From Them Virtue And Enterprise. We Laugh At Honor And Are Shocked To Find Traitors In Our Midst.

There Is No Use In Talking As If Forgiveness Were Easy. For We Find That The Work Of Forgiveness Has To Be Done Over And Over Again.

Pilate Was Merciful Till It Became Risky.

Screwtape Letters

The Enemy Will Not See You Vanish Into God's Company Without An Effort To Reclaim You.

...here Also Forgiving Does Not Mean Excusing. Many People Seem To Think It Does. They Think That If You Ask Them To Forgive Someone Who Has Cheated Or Bullied Them You Are Trying To Make Out That There Was Really No Cheating Or Bullying. But If That Were So, There Would Be Nothing To Forgive. (this Doesn't Mean That You Must Necessarily Believe His Next Promise. It Does Mean That You Must Make Every Effort To Kill Every Taste Of Resentment In Your Own Heart - Every Wish To Humiliate Or Hurt Him Or To Pay Him Out.)

The Most Dangerous Ideas In A Society Are Not The Ones Being Argued, But The Ones That Are Assumed.

Dangerous Ideas

It Is Wonderful What You Can Do When You Have To.

You Never Know How Much You Really Believe Anything Until Its Truth Of Falsehood Becomes A Matter Of Life And Death To You. It Is Easy To Say You Believe A Rope To Be Strong And Sound As Long As You Are Merely Using It To Cord A Box. But Suppose You Had To Hang By That Rope Over A Precipice. Wouldn't You Then First Discover How Much You Really Trusted It?

God Has Infinite Attention, Infinite Leisure To Spare For Each One Of Us. He Doesn't Have To Take Us In The Line. You're As Much Alone With Him As If You Were The Only Thing He'd Ever Created.

The Way For A Person To Develop A Style Is (a) To Know Exactly What He Wants To Say, And (b) To Be Sure He Is Saying Exactly That.

How Monotonously Alike All The Great Tyrants And Conquerors Have Been: How Gloriously Different Are The Saints.

A Work Of (whatever) Art Can Be Either 'received' Or 'used'. ...'using' Is Inferior To 'reception' Because Art, If Used Rather Than Received, Merely Facilitates, Brightens, Relieves Or Palliates Our Life, And Does Not Add To It ... When The Art In Question Is Literature A Complication Arises, For To 'receive' Significant Words Is Always, In One Sense, To 'use' Them, To Go Through And Beyond Them To An Imagined Something Which Is Not Itself Verbal.

Lucy Went First, Biting Her Lip And Trying Not To Say All The Things She Thought Of Saying To Susan. But She Forgot Them When She Fixed Her Eyes On Aslan.

Those Who Tread 'adult' As A Term Of Approval Cannot Hope To Be Considered Adult Themselves. When I Became A Man I Put Away Childish Things, Along With The Desire To Be Very Grown Up.

Child, To Say The Very Thing You Really Mean, The Whole Of It, Nothing More Or Less Or Other Than What You Really Mean; That's The Whole Art And Joy Of Words.

For Christianity Is A Fighting Religion. It Thinks God Has Made The World- That Space And Time, Heat And Cold, And All The Colors And Tastes, And All The Animals And Vegetables, Are Things That God 'made Up Out Of His Head' As A Man Makes Up A Story. But It Also Thinks That A Great Many Things Have Gone Wrong With The World That God Made And That God Insists, And Insists Very Loudly, On Our Putting Them Right Again.

From The Moment A Creature Becomes Aware Of God As God And Of Itself As Self, The Terrible Alternative Of Choosing God Or Self For The Centre Is Opened To It.

Christ Did Not Die For Man Because They Were Intrinsically Worth Dying For, But Because He Is Intrinsically Love, And Therefore Loves Infinitely.

I Wonder If People Who Asked For God To Intervene In Our World, Really Know What They Are Asking. Will They Want To Be There When God Really Does Intervene?

If We Cut Up Beasts Simply Because They Cannot Prevent Us And Because We Are Backing Our Own Side In The Struggle For Existence, It Is Only Logical To Cut Up Imbeciles, Criminals, Enemies, Or Capitalists For The Same Reasons.

In Science We Have Been Reading Only The Notes To A Poem; In Christianity We Find The Poem Itself.

Girls Aren't Very Good At Keeping Maps In Their Brains", Said Edmund, "that's Because We've Got Something In Them", Replied Lucy.

The Imagined Beings Have Their Insides On The Outside; They Are Visible Souls. And Man As A Whole, Man Pitted Against The Universe, Have We Seen Him At All Till We See That He Is Like A Hero In A Fairy Tale?

You Find Out The Strength Of A Wind By Trying To Walk Against It, Not By Lying Down.

But No One Except Lucy Knew That As It Circled The Mast It Had Whispered To Her, "courage, Dear Heart," And The Voice, She Felt Sure, Was Aslan's, And With The Voice A Delicious Smell Breathed In Her Face.

The Action Of Pity Leaps Quicker Than Light From The Highest Place To The Lowest To Bring Healing And Joy, Whatever The Cost To Itself. It Changes Darkness Into Light And Evil Into Good. But It Will Not, At The Cunning Tears Of Hell, Impose On Good The Tyranny Of Evil. Every Disease That Submits To A Cure Shall Be Cured: But We Will Not Call Blue Yellow To Please Those Who Insist On Having Jaundice, Nor Make A Midden Of The World's Garden For The Sake Of Some Who Cannot Abide The Smell Of Roses.

Yes, Pride Is A Perpetual Nagging Temptation. Keep On Knocking It On The Head, But Don't Be Too Worried About It. As Long As One Knows One Is Proud, One Is Safe From The Worst Form Of Pride.

The Value Given To The Testimony Of Any Feeling Must Depend On Our Whole Philosophy, Not Our Whole Philosophy On A Feeling.

Precisely Because We Cannot Predict The Moment, We Must Be Ready At All Moments.

We Come To Scripture Not To Learn A Subject But To Steep Ourselves In A Person.

She's The Sort Of Woman Who Lives For Others - You Can Tell The Others By Their Hunted Expression.

Feeling Like The Voice She Liked Best In All The World Was Calling Her Name.

When Pain Is To Be Born, A Little Courage Helps More Than Much Knowledge, A Little Human Sympathy More Than Much Courage, And The Least Tincture Of The Love Of God More Than All.

Never Forget That When We Are Dealing With Any Pleasure In Its Healthy And Normal And Satisfying Form, We Are, In A Sense, On The Enemy’s (god’s) Ground…he [god] Made The Pleasure: All Our Research So Far Has Not Enabled Us To Produce One. All We Can Do Is To Encourage The Humans To Take The Pleasures Which Our Enemy [god] Has Produced, At At Times, Or In Ways, Or In Degrees, Which He [god] Has Forbidden.

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.

The Central Miracle Asserted By Christians Is The Incarnation. They Say That God Became Man.

If You Do One Good Deed Your Reward Usually Is To Be Set To Do Another And Harder And Better One.

I Was At This Time Living, Like So Many Atheists Or Antitheists, In A Whirl Of Contradictions. I Maintained That God Did Not Exist. I Was Also Very Angry With God For Not Existing. I Was Equally Angry With Him For Creating A World.

As Christians We Are Tempted To Make Unnecessary Concessions To Those Outside The Faith. We Give In Too Much. Now, I Don't Mean That We Should Run The Risk Of Making A Nuisance Of Ourselves By Witnessing At Improper Times, But There Comes A Time When We Must Show That We Disagree.

No One Can Teach Riding So Well As A Horse.

Practice Makes Perfect

The Naturalists Have Been Engaged In Thinking About Nature. They Have Not Attended To The Fact That They Were Thinking. The Moment One Attends To This It Is Obvious That One's Own Thinking Cannot Be Merely A Natural Event, And That Therefore Something Other Than Nature Exists. The Supernatural Is Not Remote Or Abstruse; It Is A Matter Of Daily And Hourly Experience, As Intimate As Breathing.

What We Want Is Not More Little Books About Christianity, But More Little Books By Christians On Other Subjects--with Their Christianity Latent.

And For All I Can Tell, The Only Difference Is That What Many See We Call A Real Thing, And What Only One Sees We Call A Dream. But Things That Many See May Have No Taste Or Moment In Them At All, And Things That Are Shown Only To One May Be Spears And Water-spouts Of Truth From The Very Depth Of Truth.

A Spoiled Saint, A Pharisee, An Inquisitor, Or A Magician, Makes Better Sport To Hell Than A Mere Common Tyrant Or Debauchee.

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