Thursday Thirteen #5

Thirteen great C.S. Lewis quotes*

1. God gives his gifts where he finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.

2. Our instincts are obviously in conflict. The satisfaction of one demands the denial of another.

3. Poor [fellow] - he thought his mind was his own. Never his own until he makes it Christ's; up till then, merely a result of heredity, environment, and the state of his digestion. I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.

4. Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the incosolable longing.

5. I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous.

6. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.

7. What, then, is Nature, and how do we come to be imprisoned in a system so alien to us? Oddly enough, the question becomes much less sinister the moment one realizes that Nature is not all. Mistaken for our mother, she is terrifying and even abominable. But if she is only our sister - if she and we have a common Creator - if she is our sparring partner - then the situation is quite tolerable.

8. Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overwhelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you.

9. [Angels] are given human form because man is the only rational creature we know. Creatures higher in the natural order than ourselves, either incorporeal or animating bodies of a sort we cannot experience, must be represented symbolically if they are to be represented at all.

10. Anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it.

11. [Death] is a safety-device because, once Man has fallen, natural immortality would be the one utterly hopeless destiny for him.

12. No man knows how bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good.

13. The act of cowardice is all that matters; the emotion of fear is, in itself, no sin.

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*All quoted from _The Quotable Lewis_, ed. Martindale and Root.