Joy Cs Lewis Quotes

All images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in a last resort, "It is not high. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?" CS Lewis ~ Philip Zaleski

As he claimed the right to enjoy the literature of any period for the joy that was in it, so he claimed the liberty to profit from the insights of every generation open to his study. He would have been ashamed to know nothing of what was being said, written or done in his own day; but he felt under no obligation to find it better than the products of previous time, and especially than those which had passed the sieve of old oblivion. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

he gave an account of the Spenserian world that championed its ethical attitudes as well as their fairy-tale terms, with a rich joy in the defeat of dragons, giants, sorcerers, and sorceresses by the forces of virtue; it was a world he could inhabit and believe in as one inhabits and believes a dream of one's own; its knights, dwarfs, and ladies were real to him...he rejoiced as much in the ugliness of the giants and in the beauty of the ladies as in their spiritual significances, but most of all in the ambience of the faerie forest and plain that, he said, were carpeted with a grass greener than the common stuff of ordinary glades; this was the reality of grass, only to be apprehended in poetry: the world of the imagination was nearer to the truth than the world of the senses, notwithstanding its palpable fictions, and Spenser transcended sensuality by making use of it ~ Jocelyn Gibb

You have never talked to a mere mortal. ~ C.S. Lewis

[Lewis had a] determined impersonality towards all except his very close friends. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche. ~ C.S. Lewis

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. ~ C.S. Lewis

life-giving generosity was another depth in Lewis's nature that was part of his greatness ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. ~ C.S. Lewis

Man, to Lewis, is an immortal subject; pains are his moral remedies, salutary disciplines, willing sacrifices, playing their part in a drama of interchange between God and him. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. ~ C.S. Lewis

Lewis said sadly to me, 'When I at last realized that I was not, after all, going to be a great man...' I think he meant 'a great poet. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Good first impressions....are good for business. ~ CS-Edit

He was never quite at home in what we may call our post-positivist era ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Statistics say that when somebody tells you they love you, that person instantly becomes more likely to kill you than anyone else. ~ CS Dewildt

CS Lewis's humor supported his exposition but never dominated or diminished it. ~ Greg Cootsona

Muddled minds read him, and found themselves moving with delight in a world of clarity. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Gratitude is the best feeling I would ever have, the ultimate joy of living. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

You. You're home now. ~ CS James

What will has caused, will must be brought to correct. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Joy bursts in our lives when we go about doing the good at hand and not trying to manipulate things and times to achieve joy. ~ C.S. Lewis

Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours. ~ C.S. Lewis

Is romantic yearning an appetite for [H]eaven, or is it the ultimate refinement of covetousness? ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. ~ C.S. Lewis

The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. ~ C.S. Lewis

CS Lewis may make difficult questions accessible. I don't think he makes answers 'easy. – Debra Winger ~ Greg Cootsona

It is one thing to understand the doctrine, and quite another to be masters of the controversy.' Lewis's ambition was of course to know the doctrine and to be master of the controversy. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

The clouds that floats on life sometimes carry the rain, sometimes open up and separate for giving you the light you need to warm up ~ Carlos Sá (CS)

But who can feel ugly, when their heart feels joy ~ C.S. Lewis

The joy of juxtaposition is endless. ~ Peter B. Lewis

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony. ~ C.S. Lewis

I am probably the most selfish man you will ever meet in your life. No one gets the satisfaction or the joy that I get out of seeing kids realize there is hope. ~ Jerry Lewis

To miss out on joy is to miss out on the reason for your existence. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

Joy is the serious business of heaven. ~ C.S. Lewis

It delighted him that he could find no use of the word modern in Shakespeare that did not carry its load of contempt. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

You and I were created for joy, and if we miss it we miss the reason for our existence. If our joy is honest joy, it must somehow be congruous with human tragedy. This is the test of joy's integrity. It is compatible with pain. Only the heart that hurts has a right to joy. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

Like Johnson, Lewis was more impressive in his conversation than in his poetry, and more impressive in his prose - particularly in his learned prose - than in his conversation. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

The causes of this distribution I do not know; but from our present point of view it ought to be clear that the real problem is not why some humble pious believing people suffer, but why some do not. Our Lord Himself, it will be remembered, explained the salvation of those who are fortunate in this world only by referring to the unsearchable omnipotence of God. ~ C.S. Lewis

Grace will follow us even when we are going the wrong way ~ Ricky Maye

I believe it all. If I seem not to, it is only that my joy is too great to let my belief settle itself. ~ C.S. Lewis

Lewis lived in as good a setting as any man for the life of vigilant aestheticism...His rooms were on the first floor of New Buildings 3, and ran the width of the building, so that the sitting-room looked out on Magdalen Grove, the other half of the suite commanding the Cloister, and, in the background, the incomparable Tower. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past. ~ C.S. Lewis

Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. ~ C.S. Lewis

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words. ~ C.S. Lewis

His sentences are in homely English, and yet there is something Roman in the easy handling of clauses, and something Greek in their ascent from analogy to idea. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Lewis was an apologist from temper, from conviction, and from modesty. From temper, for he loved argument. From conviction, being traditionally orthodox. From modesty, because he laid no claim either to the learning which would have made him a theologian or to the grace which would have made him a spiritual guide. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror. (on CS Lewis) ~ John Piper

Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs? ~ C.S. Lewis

Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity. ~ C.S. Lewis

Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason? ~ C.S. Lewis

All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still 'about to be'. ~ C.S. Lewis

The primary function of mental pain, says Lewis, is to force our misdirectedness on our attention. But just as it belongs to our fallen state to be blind to holiness until we suffer the consequences of sin, and blind to a higher good until natural satisfactions are snatched from us; so equally it belongs to our state that we cannot achieve disinterestedness until it costs us pain. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

He had little sympathy...for Mirabel, and little for what I have called the New Sensibility of the early 'twenties, for its flat bleakness, its lawless versification, its unheroic tone, its unintelligible images, its 'modernity' in short. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

His conversion to Christianity seems to have come about largely by thinking...It did not come by sudden intuition, or overwhelming vision, or even by the more usual path of conviction of sin calling for repentance and atonement. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

When under suffering we see good men go to pieces we do not witness the failure of a moral discipline to take effect; we witness the advance of death where death comes by inches. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

a favourite couplet of Dunbar's sums up his view of the whole duty and delight of Man:

Man, please thy Maker and be merry
And give not for this world a cherry. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Leland Lewis all sentient Beings are now present for the prophesized great planet wide transition ~ Leland Lewis

I believe Williams was the only one of us, except perhaps Ronald Tolkien, from whom Lewis learnt any of his thinking. It was Charles Williams who expounded to him the doctrine of co-inherence and the idea that one had power to accept into one's own body the pain of someone else, through Christian love. This was a power...he had been allowed to use to ease the suffering of his wife, a cancer victim ~ Jocelyn Gibb

The culmination of Sehnsucht [Longing, Joy] in the rhapsodic joy of heaven is, for me at least, the strongest single element in Lewis. In one way or other it hovers over nearly every one of his books and suggests to me that Lewis's apocalyptic vision is perhaps more real than that of anyone since St. John on Patmos. ~ Clyde S. Kilby

Love Warriors embrace the battlefield at dawn, blaze the banner of hope til dusk then silently splash the waters of joy through our dreams at night. ~ Cathie Wright-Lewis

I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: "Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him." And they cried out in a great voice: "He made us." CS Lewis ~ Philip Zaleski

One brain's blueprint may promote joy more readily than most; in another, pessimism reigns. Whether happiness infuses or eludes a person depends, in part, on the DNA he has chanced to receive. (152) ~ Thomas Lewis

Either CS (coordinate system) could be used with equal justification. The two sentences: the sun is at rest and the earth moves, or the sun moves and the earth is at rest, would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS ~ Albert Einstein

The gift of phrase was instantaneous to him in him, and that must partly account for his huge output; but there was a plentitude of mind as well as a swiftness of phrase to help him; he never put a nib wrong. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

I think a lot of musicians play for the playback. I mean, that's the joy of recording - you want to hear what you've done and what you've contributed - but never listening to that playback kind of removes the intellectual part of making music, and it removes the tendency to be revisionist. ~ Jenny Lewis

...to limit the meaning of Aslan simply to lion from Turkish is to miss its deep northern resonances and the song of the snowflakes whirling around it. Lewis admitted that, as a boy, he had been 'crazed by northern–ness' and there are many subtle references to Norse mythology in the story.
In fact, if we treat Aslan as a word from Old Norse, it simply means god of the land. By combining that meaning with Turkish lion, it is essentially cognate which Welsh, Llew, lion, the very word from which the name Lewis is derived. ~ Anne Hamilton

I suppose it's unfair, tricks of argument that leave wounds, but with this sort of thing that (C.S.) Lewis does, what I feel is a craftsman's joy at the sight of a superior performance. ~ Joy Davidman

The fear structure is viewed as a program (in the sense of a computer program) for escaping or avoiding danger and includes several kinds of stored propositions: It includes propositions about threats - when the threat signal (CS) occurs, a bad thing (US) follows; propositions about physiological changes - when the CS occurs, I sweat and my heart beats faster; propositions ~ Joseph E. Ledoux

With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis. ~ C.S. Lewis

God and His acts are not in time. ~ C.S. Lewis

How long is forever?
Sometimes just one second ~ Lewis Carroll

This must be a simply enormous wardrobe! ~ C.S. Lewis

You know you're in love when you open your heart knowing there's a chance it may be broken but in opening your heart, you experience a love that you never dreamed possible. ~ Theresa Lewis

I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge. There was no Betjemannic irony about it; only a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one's nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was."
― C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy ~ C.S. Lewis

I sense in his style an indefeasible core of Protestant certainties, the certainties of a simple, unchanging, entrenched ethic that knows how to distinguish, unarguably, between Right and Wrong, Natural and Unnatural, High and Low, Black and White, with a committed force, an ethic on which his ramified and seemingly conciliatory structures of argument are invisibly based ~ Jocelyn Gibb

he almost never spoke about himself, in my hearing at least: though once, shortly after his marriage, when he brought his wife to lunch with me, he said...looking at her across the grassy quadrangle, 'I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my twenties. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Art is the only thing that helps people stay alive, and it is the only thing that has allowed people to create joy in this insane, suppressive universe. And art is the only thing that they can't get rid of. They've tried, but ultimately they can't stamp it out. ~ Juliette Lewis

As there is one Face above all worlds merely to see which is irrevocable joy, so at the bottom of all worlds that face is waiting whose sight alone is the misery from which none who beholds it can recover. ~ C.S. Lewis

While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit. ~ Lewis Carroll

Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once. ~ C.S. Lewis

He often expressed his amazement...at the power of theatre to transfigure a play, and inject it with significances he could never have imagined without it: yet for all that, he did not change custom or become a theatregoer, and this...was a part of the price he had to pay for a habit of Protestantism. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Unattainability. The most intense joy lies not in the having, but in
the desiring. The delight that never fades, the bliss that is eternal,
is only yours when what you most desire is just out of your reach. ~ C.S. Lewis

That is the true joy of being a solo artist. I can do whatever I want. I can go wherever I want. I can show up with my guitar and my song, and it can sound a hundred different ways. That's the freedom of being on your own. The flipside is: That's you on the cover. If it sucks, it's your fault. ~ Jenny Lewis

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. ~ C.S. Lewis

What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Ch. 1 ~ Lewis Carroll

There was...the discrepancy between what one expected of the accomplished medieval scholar (and, later, the penetrating exponent of theological and spiritual matters) and the robust, no-nonsense, unmistakably strident man, clumsy in movement and in dress, apparently little sensitive to the feelings of others, determined to cut his way to the heart of any matter with shouts of distinguo! before re-shaping it entirely. One quickly felt that for him dialectic supplied the place of conversation. Any general remarks were of an obvious and even platitudinous kind; talk was dead timber until the spark of argument flashed. Then in a trice you were whisked from particular to fundamental principles; thence (if you wanted) to eternal verities; and Lewis was alert for any riposte you could muster. It was comic as well as breathtaking; and Lewis would see the comedy as readily as the next man. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. ~ C.S. Lewis

Keep going, no matter what."
--Reginald F. Lewis: Lawyer, entrepreneur, philanthropist, Chairman, CEO --- ~ Reginald F. Lewis

God's will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces the intrinsically good. But when we have said that God commands thing only because they are good, we must add that one of the things intrinsically good is that rational creatures should freely surrender themselves to their Creator in obedience. The content of our obedience - the thing we are commanded to do -- will always be something intrinsically good, something we ought to do even if (by an impossible supposition_ God had not commanded it. But in addition to the content, the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fill, treads Adam's dance backward, and returns. ~ C.S. Lewis

Over the years, I found myself traveling parts of the Lewis and Clark Trail, putting my hands in the river where they set out from St. Louis, viewing the Great Falls of Montana, standing by the same Pacific Ocean they saw with such joy. ~ Joseph Bruchac

People are still crying out for Lennox Lewis. They still want to see Lennox Lewis. That motivated me. I am still young. I have a couple fights left in me. ~ Lennox Lewis

Lewis encourages his cancer-stricken and temporarily depressed wife that uncertainty rather than hopelessness is our cross. ~ C.S. Lewis

time is better for you. ~ Joy

Lewis: "Oh, no."
Kaitlyn: "Lewis?"
Lewis: "Hi, Kaitlyn. Hi. Rob."
Rob: "G'way, Lewis. I'm sleeping."
Kaitlyn: "Hi. Anna."
Anna: "Hi, Kait."
Lewis: "Hi, Anna."
Gabriel: "And good night, John-Boy! Shut the hell up, all of you! ~ L.J.Smith

We CAN talk,' said the Tiger-lily: 'when there's anybody worth talking to ~ Lewis Carroll

It was joy, joy, happy joy.
Happy, happy joy.
A big fat smiley sun rose above the rooftops and beamed down its blessings onto the borough known as Brentford. ~ Robert Rankin

It's ridiculous to leave all the conversation to the pudding! ~ Lewis Carroll

I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to fuck me? ~ Michael Lewis

There is no real and true joy of if that joy is not imbued with love. Love cannot exist without joy. ~ Torkom Saraydarian