Notes/Quotes From C.S Lewis: Mere Christianity

Mere Christianity

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that is 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 a word without meaning.
-CSL

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.
-CSL

I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way.... Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled... Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.
-CSL

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
-CSL

If God thinks this state of war in the universe 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 can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings-- then we may take it it is worth paying.
-CSL

What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could 'be like gods'-- could set up their own as if they had created themselves-- be their own masters-- invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside of God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history-- money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-- the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
-CSL

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 patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
-CSL

The perfect submission, the perfect suffering, the perfect death were not only easier to Jesus because He was God, but were possible only because He was God. But surely that is a very odd reason for not accepting them?... That advantage-- call it 'unfair' if you like-- is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?
-CSL

God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He created it.
-CSL

We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw materials.
-CSL

Another notion we get from novels and plays is that 'falling in love' is something quite irresistable; something that just happens to one, like measles.
-CSL

Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently 'Love your neighbor' does not mean 'feel fond of him' or 'find him attractive'.... of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying...

I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself. God intends us to love all selves in the same way and for the same reason: but He has given us the sun ready worked out in our own case to show us how it works. We have then got to go on and apply the rule to all the other selves. Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that this is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things we call selves. For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco...
-CSL

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.
-CSL

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.
-CSL

(God) and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble-- delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.
-CSL

When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
-CSL

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.
-CSL

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists... If i find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
-CSL

To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.
-CSL

...This is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
-CSL

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
-CSL

The Christian way is different: harder, easier. Christ says 'Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good... I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out... I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own shall become yours.'
-CSL

We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinately being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
-CSL (that's my favorite :])

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-- and might even be more difficult to save.
-CSL

I wonder what an ordinary baby would do if it had the choice. It might prefer to stay in the dark and warmth and safety of the womb. For of course it would think that the womb meant safety. That would be just where it was wrong; for if it stays there it will die.
-CSL

The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call 'Myself' becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop.
-CSL

Keep back nothing... Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for Christ and you will find him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
-CSL