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They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.

C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis
Age: 64 †
Born: 1898
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Broadcaster
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Belfast
Ireland
Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
Mind
Chosen
Prison
Minds
Afraid
Instead
Belief
Taken
Cannot
Cunning

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Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night —little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape wil be quite hidden in the end.
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Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
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First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood we write in order to understand.
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It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that 'from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.' To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.
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Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.
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A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest. He also said: No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally - and often far more - worth reading at the age of 50 and beyond.
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An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.
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A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.
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I am struck here by the curious mixture of justice and injustice in our lives. We are blamed for our real faults but usually not on the right occasions.
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Autumn is really the best of the seasons and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life.
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Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one.
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...this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.
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The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self changed into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One's most private wishes, one's point of view, are the things that have to be changed.
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Joy is the serious business of heaven.
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Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect.
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Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
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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.
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