Browsing Quotes By C. S. Lewis
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One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of such things (all the duties, rules, guilt, virtues of mortality), 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.
Speaker: C. S. LewisSource: Mere ChristianityPosted: 07 Oct 2014 at 12:03 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine,” Lewis says in Mere Christianity. “A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. 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. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
Speaker: C. S. LewisPosted: 14 Nov 2012 at 2:21 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.
Speaker: C. S. LewisSource: Mere ChristianityPosted: 22 Jul 2010 at 2:04 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you. And your natural self, which is thus being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier. It is as though Jesus were saying to each of us: '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. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. . . .
Hand over the whole natural self. . . . I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.'Speaker: C. S. LewisSource: Mere Christianity, page 166Posted: 03 Sep 2009 at 2:14 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!