Monday, June 18, 2007

C.S. Lewis Quotations

Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
- C.S. Lewis. ---> clickable link of the site where I found it.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
- C.S. 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.
- C.S. Lewis.

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. – The Problem of Pain
- C.S. Lewis.

“You will never know how much you believe something until it is a matter of life and death.” “If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.” – God in the Dock, page 52.
- C.S. Lewis.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. – Mere Christianity, pages 40-41.
- C.S. Lewis.


I would LOVE to read his book: Four Loves. This is the excerpt of what one reviewer said about that particular book:
One basic principle of Lewis's work is the distinction between Need-love and Gift-love. The Need-love has to do, for Lewis, with "a craving to be loved," which is akin to a child's longing for the love of his parents'. Instead of disparaging this type of love as wholely selfish, Lewis describes how this type of love, while limited, is "the accurate reflection in consciousness of our actual nature." Lewis writes that "we need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves." Lewis acknowledges the human condition sympathetically. Gift-love, by contrast, has its ultimate expression in Christ's death on the cross. This is an active, selfless love. Lewis characterizes Gift-love in its ordinary expression as "that love which moves a man to work and plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he will die without sharing or seeing."
- vabrookreader "Jeff Hotz"

4 comments:

  1. Excellent entry, my dear Amel! I adore the writings of C.S. Lewis.

    I have not read 'Four Loves', but I think the concept of 'Need-Love' should be expanded. It is probably the basis of all neurosis when it is improperly channeled. There may be a very deep-seated anger, sadness, or resentment if love is not received. We see an obvious difference between someone who is truly successful (not just in material wealth) and someone who plays the role of 'victim' their whole life. Is being loved a factor? Think about it. Is it ever that the successful person does not feel loved and the 'victim' does?

    Where 'Need-Love' is deficient, there is also an insatiable appetite for things that could not possibly fill this need. It's as if people try to squeeze water from a rock in a desperate attempt to get the rock, with which he/she is familiar, to hydrate them. Instead of looking elsewhere to have this need filled (such as from God), people look at the things that are already familiar to them. These things become addictions to those people. Not everyone who works is a workaholic. Not everyone in a relationship is co-dependent.

    I also think 'Need-Love' is the trait in us that the Holy Spirit uses to draw people to God. Those that can be drawn are the ones that recognize, and deeply acknowledge, this need. That's one reason why people can be 'saved' anytime, anywhere, no matter what they've done. Once drawn to God through Christ, the person now has a previously unavailable means to mature spiritually - Christ in them. It is then that the 'Give-Love' can be fully and selflessly realized.

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  2. Hmmm...I can't say much about this as I haven't read the book myself. Another reviewer said this, though:

    "I believe Lewis makes the case that God's love should be primary in the lives of humans. The other loves, though they can be wonderful in their place, can be used unnaturally and ineffectively to try and fill in for Agape if it is not felt. A healthy life will involve all four loves. Yet they must be rooted and grounded in Agape." - NotATameLion

    Another reviewer said that C.S. Lewis also explained about the danger of distortion and abuse of each type of love.

    But I agree with you about the two last paragraphs of yours. When it comes to the truly successful person versus the "victim", I have to think about it first he he he...

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  3. Lovely quotes. I've only read the Narnia books (When I was about 11) so all these quotes were new for me.

    I love the first one about friends. That is so true.

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  4. Yep, I loved the first one too he he he...

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