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And all the time - such is the tragic comedy of our situation - we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

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
Time
Virtue
Enterprise
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Situation
Laugh
Rendering
Quality
Expect
Traitor
Find
Continue
Chests
Without
Honor
Shocked
Make
Laughing
Tragic
Castrate
Men
Comedy
Qualities
Traitors

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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I have seen great beauty of spirit in some who were great sufferers. I have seen men, for the most part, grow better not worse with advancing years, and I have seen the last illness produce treasures of fortitude and meekness from most unpromising subjects.
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I may repeat 'Do as you would be done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love Godand I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey him.
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We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.
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Friendship is...the sort of love one can imagine between angels.
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Got to start by finding it, have we? Can't start by looking for it, I suppose?
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Well!' said Puddleglum, rubbing his hands. 'This is just what I needed. If these chaps don't teach me to take a serious view of life, I don't know what will.
C. S. Lewis
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We must beware of the Past, mustn't we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved.
C. S. Lewis
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At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.
C. S. Lewis
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Prosperity knits a man to the world.
C. S. Lewis
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We are not meant to be perpetually solemn: We must play.
C. S. Lewis
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That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.
C. S. Lewis
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And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back--if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?
C. S. Lewis
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I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep, not Try experiments on my rats, or even Teach my performing dogs new tricks.
C. S. Lewis
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Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works.
C. S. Lewis
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Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.
C. S. Lewis
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The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.
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If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?
C. S. Lewis
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I expect you have seen someone put a a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened and then you notice a tiny steak of flame creeping along the edged of the newspaper. It was like that now.
C. S. Lewis