Notes/Quotes From C.S Lewis: Miracles

This troublesomeness does not of course prove (Christianity) to be true; but if it were true it would be bound to have this troublesomeness. The real musician is similarly troublesome to a man who wishes to indulge in untaught 'musical appreciation'; the real historian is similarly a nuisance when we want to romance about 'the old days' or 'the ancient Greeks and Romans'. The ascertained nature of any real thing is always at first a nuisance to our natural fantasies-- a wretched, pedantic, logic-chopping intruder upon a conversation which was getting on famously without it.
-CSL

Laws give us only a universe of 'Ifs and Ands': not this universe which actually exists. What we know through laws and general principles is a series of connections. But in order for there to be a real universe the connections must be given something to connect; a torrent of opaque actualities must be fed into the pattern. If God created the world, then He is precisely the source of this torrent, and it alone gives our truest principles anything to be true about.
-CSL

Unless the origin of all other things were itself concrete and individual, nothing else could be so; for there is no conceivable means whereby what is abstract or general could itself produce concrete reality. Bookkeeping, continued to all eternity, could never produce one farthing. Metre, of itself, could never produce a poem.
-CSL

It is clear that there was never a time when nothing existed; otherwise nothing would exist now. But to exist means to be a positive SOmething, to have (metaphorically) a certain shape or structure, to be this and not that. The Thing which always existed, namely God, has therefore always had His own positive character... We know that He invents, acts, creates. After that there can be no ground for assuming in advance that He does not do miracles.
-CSL

At each step we have to strip off from our idea of God some human attribute. But the only real reason for strippin goff the human attribute is to make room for putting in some positive divine attribute. In St Paul's language, the purpose of all this unclothing is not that our idea of God should reach nakedness but that it should be reclothed.
-CSL

Silences in the physical world occur in empty places: but the ultimate Peace is silent through very density of life. Saying is swallowed up in being. There is no movement because His action (which is Himself) is timeless. You might, if you wished, call it movement at an infinite speed, which is the same thing as rest, but reached by a different-- perhaps a less misleading-- way of approach.
-CSL

There is certainly a state of war. But not a war of mutual destruction. (Human) Nature by dominating spirit wrecks all spiritual activities: spirit by dominating Nature confirms and improves natural activities.
-CSL

Spirit and Nature have quarrelled in us; that is our disease. Nothing we can yet to enables us to imagine its complete healing.
-CSL

...That we should see a miracle is even less likely. Nor, if we understand, shall we be anxious to do so. 'Nothing almost sees miracles but misery.' Miracles and martyrdoms tend to bunch about the same areas of history-- areas we have naturally no wish to frequent. Do not, I earnestly advise you, demand an ocular proof unless you are already perfectly certain that it is not forthcoming.
-CSL

All creatures of course live from God in the sense that HE made them and at every moment maintains them in existance. But there is a further and higher kind of 'life from God' which can be given only to a creature who voluntarily surrenders himself to it. This life the good angels have and the bad angels have not: and it is absolutely Supernatural because no creature in any world can have it by the mere fact of being the sort of creature it is.
-CSL

The regenerate man will find his soul eventually harmonised with his spirit by the life of Christ that is in him.
-CSL