The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.
There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
The death of a beloved is an amputation.
Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together. If the voice within us does not say this it is not the voice of Eros.
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.
Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.
Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.
For the mention of Aslan gave him a mysterious and horrible feeling just as it gave the others a mysterious and lovely feeling. Just.
If you don’t read good books, you will read bad ones, if you don’t go on thinking rationally you will think irrationally, if you reject aesthetic satisfactions you will fall into sensual satisfactions.
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy – that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends.
When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
Nothing like small enough. For a damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.
Have courage, dear heart, for there is nothing to be afraid of and never has been.
But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice.
Harold says one of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to Facts.
But I was very weak. Weakness, and work, are two comforts the gods have not taken from us.
He wondered how he ever could have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets – the ‘earths’ he called them in his thought – as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven – excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.