Quotes C. S. Lewis - page 11
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The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.
Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will
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If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself
If God thinks this state of war in the universe is a price worth paying for free will--that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings--then we may take it it is worth paying.
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.
Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would 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.
I was not born to be free---I was born to adore and obey.
One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.
I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature to be exploited or, at best, patronised. Only one or two, and those the holiest among us, would glance a second time at the naked, shaggy-bearded, slow spoken creature: but they, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet.
'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'.
I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.
I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him.
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And above all, you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling…the question should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness there? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to move to this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike for this particular door-keeper?
We must beware of the Past, mustn't we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved.
