Everyone and everything needed to be raised to its highest level – the teacher must become a mage, the husband a knight errant, the labor a hero in a sacred drama – intensified, rarefied, baptized in...
J.R.R. Tolkien told a questioning correspondent, life's purpose is to know, praise, and thank God.
The longing for Joy is in itself Joy. When he recalled when he had experienced Joy, he was, in that recollection, experiencing Joy anew, though he knew it not. Joy was not a state; it was an arrow poi...
I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: "Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him." And they cried out in a great voice: "He made us." CS Lewis
All images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in a last resort, "It is not high. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What d...
One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.
Like all great readers, he could create for himself a "wall of stillness".
Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as fric...
J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, "could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.
Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.
Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, "freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity – from possessiveness.
Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.
Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness.
The author observes of the Inklings, "they make a perfect compass rose of faith: talking the Catholic, Lewis the "mere Christian," Williams the Anglican, Barfield the esotericist.
We still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. C.S. Lewis
Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God.
As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.
He called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime.
He trusted the cosmos – but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.
Now a theist, he thought he should behave like one, even if it meant him during "the fussy, time-wasting, botheration of it all! the bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perp...
