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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.

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
Creatures
Centre
Terrible
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Opened
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Creature
Moments
Alternatives
Self
God
Aware
Atheism
Choosing

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God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
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The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.
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if anyone present wishes to make me the subject of his wit, I am very much at his service--with my sword--whenever he has leisure.
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There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.
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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.
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You people have no imagination!
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For the church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ, in which all members, however different, (and He rejoices in their differences and by no means wishes to iron them out) must share the common life, complementing and helping one another precisely by their differences.
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The more we get what we now call 'ourselves' out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.
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I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness you are not needed there at all. No scope of your talents only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God. (pg 40)
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God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.
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When you have reached your own room, be kind to those Who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.
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The Scotch catechism says that man's chief end is 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.' But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
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If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.
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Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
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But why,... if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own? Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality.
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But do you really mean, Sir, said Peter, that there could be other worlds-all over the place, just round the corner-like that? Nothing is more probable, said the Profesor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.
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[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.
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The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike...Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.
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And what about you? You must be some kind of beardless dwarf?...You mean to say, that you're a daughter of Eve?...Y-yes, but, you are in fact... human?
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The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.
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