Levy’s Reviews > A Year with C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works > Status Update

"It is really possible to be carried away by religious emotion... into resolutions which we shall not sinfully but rationally, not when we are more worldly but when we are wiser, have cause to regret. We can become scrupulous or fanatical; we can, in what seems zeal but is really presumption, embrace tasks never intended for us."

"Our temptation is to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted [of us as Christians]. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers. We make our returns truthfully. But we dread a ride in the tax. We are very careful to lay no more than is necessary. And we hope - we very ardently hope - that after we have paid it there will still be enough left to live on."

"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 with and, in the end, despair."

"That is just why a vague religion -- all about feeling God in nature, and so on -- is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work: like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers and music."

"God [says] to men 'You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you.'"

"How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes "

"If God is Love, He is, by definition something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense."