C.S. Lewis’ Little Book of Wisdom: Meditations on Faith, Life, Love and Literature. Andrea Assaf Kirk

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 Weight of Glory

      The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ.

       Mere Christianity

      A good, but unexamined life will be high on duty and not likely to celebrate the odd paradoxes, the ironic coincidences, and the humor of being dirt …

       Surprised by Joy

      The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become—because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be … It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

       Mere Christianity

      You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

       A Grief Observed

      Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

       Mere Christianity

      For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

      ‘Equality’ in Present Concerns

      Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things …

      ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’ in

      Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories

      Make your choice, adventurous Stranger, Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had.

       The Magician’s Nephew

      Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

       Mere Christianity

      You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope.

       Mere Christianity

      Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity—like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.

       Perelandra

      Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

      ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’ in

      Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories

      Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

       Mere Christianity

      If God had granted all the silly prayers I’ve made in my life, where should I be now?

       Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

      If you’re thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you’re embarking on something, which will take the whole of you.

       Mere Christianity

      Christianity, if false, is of no importance and, if true, is of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

       God in the Dock

      If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can