“Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”
| The Four Loves
“It is clear that this knowledge of his death must have somehow been withdrawn from him before he prayed in Gethsemane. He could not, with whatever reservation about the Father’s will, have prayed that the cup might pass and simultaneously known that it would not. That is both a logical and psychological impossibility. You see what this involves? Lest any trial incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope – of suspense, anxiety- were at the last moment looser upon him – the supposed possibility that, after all, he might, he just conceivably might, be spared from the supreme horror. There was precedent. Isaac had hern spared; he too at the last moment, he also against all apparent possibility. But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and the consequent tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps he would not have been very man. To live in a fully predictable world is not to be man.”
“If you are a nice person–if virtue comes easily to you–beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own merits what are really God’s gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous.”
“Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service, you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.”
“The difference is that Christianity thinks this dark power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with duelism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war , a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.”
| Mere Chrisitanity
“All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by the words ‘I ought’ or ‘I ought not’…Morality is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be ‘given’ in the facts of experience.”
“Do not think that I am saying anything against science. I am only saying what its job is. If there is something behind, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing are neither of them statements that science can make.”
“The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under.”
| The Screwtape Letters
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”