This is a book about something
aslan c-s-lewis christian digory fantasy magician-s-nephew narnia polly
Of Course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is).. Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.
c-s-lewis christ christianity faith god hope hopeless hopelessness letter seek seeking theology
Here I am going to say something which may come as a bit of a shock. God doesn't necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to be loved by Him. We don't start off being all that lovable, if we're honest. What makes people hard to love? Isn't it what is commonly called selfishness? Selfish people are hard to love because so little love comes out of them.
c-s-lewis god happy selfish selfishness tso-love
Self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation. If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him.
c-s-lewis god salvation self-sufficiency
To put it another way, pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can't he rouse us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be wakened, is the dream that all is well.
c-s-lewis god pain suffering
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity
c-s-lewis courage ethics honor morality religion tao
Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.
c-s-lewis philosophy
In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.
c-s-lewis literature quote
My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I had. Obviously we couldn't buy centaurs and fauns and elves and fairies, so I made them to play with the normal dolls I had. I must have been about six years old when I started making fantasy dolls.
c-s-lewis childhood doll-making fantasy-books narnia reading the-lord-of-the-rings
God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.
c-s-lewis selfishness suffering
Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.
c-s-lewis till-we-have-faces writing writing-craft
Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.
c-s-lewis children grown-ups narnia silliness
A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.
c-s-lewis prayer
But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver. No, said Tolkien, they are not.. Just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil. You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand.
c-s-lewis christ myth myths splintered-light sub-creator tolkien true-myth