Tuesday, November 19, 2013

A C.S. Lewis Eleventary

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point."

“The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their consciences.”

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”

“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' All that are in Hell chose it."

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

"You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society."

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

"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."

Another C.S. Lewis Eleventary

“'Safe?' said Mr. Beaver; 'don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.'”

"If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man."

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

“God will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist’s shop.”

"A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute."

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

“To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.”

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell."