C.S. Lewis Quotes - Page 10

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.

There are far better things ahead than we leave behind.

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

The English... are the most deplorable milksops. They are creatures of that miserable sort who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door.

For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.

We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

In the twinkling of an eye, in a time too small to be measured, and in any place, all that seems to divide us from God can flee away, vanish, leaving us naked before Him, like the first man, like the only man, as if nothing but He and I existed.

Now it is time!" then louder, "Time!"; and then so loud it could have shaken the stars; "TIME." The door flew open.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

I knew the world too well to believe this sudden smiling. (…) The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.

Revolutions often perpetuate the old evil under a new name.

A society which is predominantly Christian will propagate Christianity: One which is not, will not. We have, in the long run, little either to hope or to fear from government.

We are defending Christianity; not "my religion". When we mention our personal opinions we must always make quite clear the difference between them and the Faith itself.

الأكل والقراءة متعتان رائعتان .. وسوياً يصبحا أكثر إمتاعاً

The more imagination the reader has, being an untrained reader, the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.

Even if it is a vice to read science fiction, those who cannot understand the very temptation to that vice will not be likely to tell us anything of value about it.

He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.

It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.