Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves—to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
The point is that each person’s pride is in competition with every one else’s pride.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive—is competitive by its very nature—while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Pleasure in being praised is not Pride.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration, too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a child-like and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
This same spiritual law works terribly in the opposite direction. The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them: afterwards they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them. The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become—and so on in a vicious circle for ever.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
They are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
That is why daily prayers and religious readings and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
I said just now that the question of Faith in this sense arises after a man has tried his level best to practise the Christian virtues, and found that he fails, and seen that even if he could he would only be giving back to God what was already God’s own. In other words, he discovers his bankruptcy.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, ‘You must do this. I can’t.’
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
If you like to put it that way, Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing. In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the point of recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
The answer to that nonsense, of course, would be that good actions done for that motive, done with the idea that Heaven can be bought, would not be good actions at all, but only commercial speculations.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
The answer to that nonsense is that, if what you call your ‘faith’ in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what He says, then it is not Faith at all—not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work: like watching the waves from the beach.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
But what man, in his natural condition, has not got, is Spiritual life—the higher and different sort of life that exists in God.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man. And that is precisely what Christianity is about.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on—the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others—not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
And that means not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to one another.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
He does not ‘foresee’ you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already ‘Now’ for Him.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
He is the self-expression of the Father—what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
The union between the Father and the Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
In the Christian life you are not usually looking at Him. He is always acting through you. If you think of the Father as something ‘out there’, in front of you, and of the Son as someone standing at your side, helping you to pray, trying to turn you into another son, then you have to think of the third Person as something inside you, or behind you.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless ‘spiritual’ life, has been done for us. Humanity is already ‘saved’ in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Have the words ‘Could have been’ any sense at all when applied to God?
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
But when you are talking about God—i.e. about the rock bottom, irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend—it is nonsensical to ask if it could have been otherwise. It is what it is, and there is an end of the matter.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things. On the other hand, when you are tempted not to bother about someone else’s troubles because they are ‘no business of yours’, remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
We must go on to recognise the real Giver. It is madness not to. Because, if we do not, we shall be relying on human beings. And that is going to let us down. The best of them will make mistakes; all of them will die.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is?
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
In reality, of course, it is God who does everything. We, at most, allow it to be done to us.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves’, to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good’. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way—centred on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
On the other hand, you must realise from the outset that the goal towards which He is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
If Christianity is true then it ought to follow (a) That any Christian will be nicer than the same person would be if he were not a Christian. (b) That any man who becomes a Christian will be nicer than he was before.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
What can you ever really know of other people’s souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
They love you more than other men do, but they need you less. (We must get over wanting to be needed: in some goodish people, specially women, that is the hardest of all temptations to resist.)
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours.
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
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 (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
C. S. Lewis and Kathleen Norris
He viewed television as not mere entertainment, but as a tool for self-reflection as well as a means of real communication.
Mister Rogers: A Biography of the Wonderful Life of Fred Rogers (Bio Shorts Book 3)
Jennifer Warner and LifeCaps
As a television host, he tried to get across to parents and children that ignoring feelings never solved any problems and that children needed to find a way to get those feelings out.
Mister Rogers: A Biography of the Wonderful Life of Fred Rogers (Bio Shorts Book 3)
Jennifer Warner and LifeCaps
Even later, when he became the host of Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood, he made it a point never to pitch anything to the children in his audience, believing, perhaps rightly so, that doing so would violate their trust in him.
Mister Rogers: A Biography of the Wonderful Life of Fred Rogers (Bio Shorts Book 3)
Jennifer Warner and LifeCaps
This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
But a moment's thought will show that if disease is beautiful, it is generally some one else's disease.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
In short, oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials. Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it. In the first case the road is open and I can go as far as I like; in the second the road is shut. But the case is even stronger, and the parallel with madness is yet more strange. For it was our case against the exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic that, right or wrong, it gradually destroyed his humanity. Now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism.
Orthodoxy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton