ariana > ariana's Quotes

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”
― C. S. Lewis

“That's the worst of girls," said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. "They never can carry a map in their heads."
"That's because our heads have something inside them," said Lucy.”
― C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
― C.S. Lewis

“And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.”
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

“A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...”
― C.S. Lewis

“You can't know, you can only believe - or not.”
― C.S. Lewis

“For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
― C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Now we cannot...discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I seemed to hear God saying, "Put down your gun and we'll talk.”
― C.S. Lewis

“He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“Readers are advised to remember the devil is a liar.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”
― C.S. Lewis, Miracles

“There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”
― C. S. Lewis

“The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it.”
― C.S. Lewis