Quotes from lewis c s ii

Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

Nothing is yet in its true form.

We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may "conquer" them.

Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.

You must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. 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.

The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

Some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what he had not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery.

Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for "down here" is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment's rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.