Tag: Clive Staples Lewis

Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Quote, saying and phrase by: Clive Staples Lewis

Prosperity knits a man to the world. He thinks he’s ‘finding his place in it,’ while really it is finding its place in him.

Quote, saying and phrase by: Clive Staples 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.

Quote, saying and phrase by: Clive Staples Lewis

The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Quote, saying and phrase by: Clive Staples Lewis

The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself and thinking about worship is a different thing than worshipping … ‘Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god.

Quote, saying and phrase by: Clive Staples Lewis

The safest road to hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Quote, saying and phrase by: Clive Staples Lewis

We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.

Quote, saying and phrase by: Clive Staples Lewis

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence — moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how ‘democracy’ (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic.’ Children who are fit to proceed may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when ‘I’m as good as you’ has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented who are they to overtop their fellows And anyway, the teachers — or should I say nurses — will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men.

Quote, saying and phrase by: Clive Staples 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.

Quote, saying and phrase by: Clive Staples Lewis

When we lose one blessing, another is often, most unexpectedly, given in its place.

Quote, saying and phrase by: Clive Staples Lewis