To: 3dognight
>>So I'm not in a rush to go see/read more CS Lewis. If I bite into a piece of fruit and it's rotten I don't finish eating it to see if there's any good part of it.<<
Man, I think you're way out of your depth, here. C.S. Lewis, and specifically "Mere Christianity" changed my life. Reading your posts here, I seriously doubt I will persuade you or change your mind, but in my opinion you would be profoundly irresponsible - particularly in light of your reliance on the wacky webiste you linked - to steer anyone away from Lewis.
C. S. Lewis Quotes
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.
C. S. Lewis
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
C. S. Lewis
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
C. S. Lewis
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
C. S. Lewis
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C. S. Lewis
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
C. S. Lewis
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
C. S. Lewis
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C. S. Lewis
Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers "Please will you do the job for me."
C. S. Lewis
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
C. S. Lewis
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
C. S. Lewis
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
C. S. Lewis
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C. S. Lewis
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!"
C. S. Lewis
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
C. S. Lewis
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C. S. Lewis
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
C. S. Lewis
Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
C. S. Lewis
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.
C. S. Lewis
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
C. S. Lewis
I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
C. S. Lewis
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
If we could know which of us, darling, would be the first to go, who would be first to breast the swelling tide and step alone upon the other side - if we could know!
C. S. Lewis
If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
C. S. Lewis
If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a "wandering to find home," why should we not look forward to the arrival?
C. S. Lewis
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.
C. S. Lewis
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
C. S. Lewis
It is hard to have patience with people who say "There is no death" or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
C. S. Lewis
It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
C. S. Lewis
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
C. S. Lewis
It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
C. S. Lewis
Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
C. S. Lewis
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
C. S. Lewis
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
C. S. Lewis
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
C. S. Lewis
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
C. S. Lewis
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
C. S. Lewis
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C. S. Lewis
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
C. S. Lewis
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
C. S. Lewis
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
C. S. Lewis
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
C. S. Lewis
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
C. S. Lewis
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
C. S. Lewis
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
C. S. Lewis
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
C. S. Lewis
The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
C. S. Lewis
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
C. S. Lewis
The safest road to hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
C. S. Lewis
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
C. S. Lewis
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."
C. S. Lewis
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
C. S. Lewis
Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.
C. S. Lewis
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
C. S. Lewis
We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
C. S. Lewis
We are what we believe we are.
C. S. Lewis
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
C. S. Lewis
What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
C. S. Lewis
What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
C. S. Lewis
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
C. S. Lewis
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
C. S. Lewis
You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
C. S. Lewis
You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
C. S. Lewis
268 posted on
06/30/2005 2:31:33 PM PDT by
itsamelman
(“Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.” -- Al Swearengen)
To: itsamelman
Thanks for your reply. I have never read Mere Christianity, however, Narnia is occultic and should not be used by Christians to teach about the Lord. I never read a review of Narnia before I saw it and had no preconceived ideas about it. But when I saw it I new it wasn't right.
As far as your qoutes from Lewis, some are good, some are real stinkers.
For instance, consider this new age qoute:
We are what we believe we are.
C. S. Lewis
We are not what we believe we are.
We are what we are.
Otherwise I could be a Bill Gates billionaire or an Indian Jones type adventurer or whatever I want to believe I am. .
Then there this one
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
C. S. Lewis
If he is talking about being saved from eternal damnation then it is not by what we have done, but by what Jesus has done. If he's talking about some guy walking away from a pit of quicksand, then its ok. So this is at worst heresy; at best meaningless (at least without some context).
To reduce God to the level of a beast that negotiates with Satan as in Narnia, is heresy even if it is just for entertainment
. Mere Christianity may or may not be a decent book, it is the work of a man so I hope you haven't made it (or the thoughts of other men)the rock upon which you stand.
Many who call themselves Christians will not read the Bible for themselves. They will read book upon book by their favorite Christian author, saint, preacher but seemingly can't read this one book. Once you know the truth of God's word, its much easier to spot a lie. Theres more I would like to write, because this is important, but I will need to post to you a little later, I have some pressing business. Here's another review of Lewis you may be interested in reading:
http://www.keepersofthefaith.com/BookReviews/BookReviewDisplay.asp?key=4
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