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C. S. Lewis

274 quotes

“If we cannot "practice the presence of God," it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep. Bur for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory." Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection — if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy — our favourite pub, our favourite wood. . . . Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food more than another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose that you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it? . . . Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And then one babbles — 'if only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.' But one can't tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed? It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be done. He replies to our babble, 'you cannot and dare not. I could and dared.'”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness and chivalry 'masculine' when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as 'feminine'.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask — half our great theological and metaphysical problems — are like that.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've described H. as being like a sword. That's true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have said 'But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you explore.' And then, of her, and every created thing I praise, I should say 'in some way, in its unique way, like Him who made it.' Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. to the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But then again of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not my idea of God, but God.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Miracles" (1942), p. 25
“The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. Of that larger script part is already visible, part is still unsolved. In other words, some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Miracles" (1942), p. 29
“I am to talk about Apologetics. Apologetics means of course Defence. The first question is — what do you propose to defend? Christianity, of course.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Christian Apologetics" (1945), p. 89
“The standard of permanent Christianity must be kept clear in our minds and it is against that standard that we must test all contemporary thought. In fact, we must at all costs not move with the times.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Christian Apologetics" (1945), p. 92
“If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vivisection" (1947), p. 227
“The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vivisection" (1947), p. 228
“As image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Priestesses in the Church?" (1948), p. 237
“To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of "normality" hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I have grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success-who cares whether this is called Punishment or not?”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949)
“The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Have you ever noticed . . . that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point? . . . I mean this, . . . . If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family — anything you like — at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (1945), ch. 13, sec. 4
“I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In other words, it forbids wholesome doubt. . . . This false certainty comes out in Professor Haldane's article. . . . It is breaking Aristotle's canon — to demand in every enquiry that degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not on your life to pretend that you see further than you do.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organisation will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi. The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety. The character in That Hideous Strength whom the Professor never mentions is Miss Hardcastle, the chief of the secret police. She is the common factor in all revolutions; and, as she says, you won’t get anyone to do her job well unless they get some kick out of it.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946), published posthumously in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966). Written in response to "Auld Hornie, F.R.S." by J. B. S. Haldane, a review of the Space Trilogy. Some of these …
“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952); in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
“I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners. It is my settled conviction that in order to read old western literature aright, you must learn to suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature. And because this is the judgment of a native, an old westerner, I claim that even if the defense of my conviction proves to be weak, the fact of my conviction is an historical datum to which you should give due weight. That way, when I fail as a critic I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not for myself but for all other old western men whom you may meet, I would say use your specimens while you can. There aren't going to be very many more dinosaurs.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Great Divide", Radio Adaptation of his Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge (29 November 1954)
“Then I dreamed that one day there was nothing but milk for them and the jailer said as he put down the pipkin: ‘Our relations with the cow are not delicate—as you can easily see if you imagine eating any of her other secretions.’ . . . John said, ‘Thank heavens! Now at last I know that you are talking nonsense. You are trying to pretend that unlike things are like. You are trying to make us think that milk is the same sort of thing as sweat or dung.’ ‘And pray, what difference is there except by custom?’ ‘Are you a liar or only a fool, that you see no difference between that which Nature casts out as refuse and that which she stores up as food?’”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘The Spirit of the Age wishes to allow argument and not to allow argument. . . . If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue themselves to show that their own doctrines are true. . . . You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.’”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nearly they stood who fall; Themselves as they look back See always in the track The one false step, where all Even yet, by lightest swerve Of foot not yet enslaved, By smallest tremor of the smallest nerve, Might have been saved.Nearly they fell who stand, And with cold after fear Look back to mark how near They grazed the Siren's land, Wondering that subtle fate, By threads so spidery fine, The choice of ways so small, the event so great, Should thus entwine.Therefore oh, man, have fear Lest oldest fears be true, Lest thou too far pursue The road that seems so clear, And step, secure, a hair-breadth bourne, Which, being once crossed forever unawares, Denies return.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmān, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The séroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then–that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute. It is not by tribal taboos and copy-book maxims that she has pursued her relentless march from the amoeba to man and from man to civilization.”“She——” began Weston."I’m sorry,” interrupted Ransom, “but I’ve forgotten who She is.”“Life, of course,” snapped Weston. “She has ruthlessly broken down all obstacles and liquidated all failures and to-day in her highest form—civilized man—and in me as his representative, she presses forward to that interplanetary leap which will, perhaps, place her for ever beyond the reach of death.”“He says,” resumed Ransom, “that these animals learned to do many difficult things, except those who could not; and those ones died and the other animals did not pity them. And he says the best animal now is the kind of man who makes the big huts and carries the heavy weights and does all the other things I told you about; and he is one of these and he says that if the others all knew what he was doing they would be pleased. He says that if he could kill you all and bring our people to live in Malacandra, then they might be able to go on living here after something had gone wrong with our world. And then if something went wrong with Malacandra they might go and kill all the hnau in another world. And then another—and so they would never die out.”“It is in her right,” said Weston, “the right, or, if you will, the might of Life herself, that I am prepared without flinching to plant the flag of man on the soil of Malacandra: to march on, step by step, superseding, where necessary, the lower forms of life that we find, claiming planet after planet, system after system, till our posterity—whatever strange form and yet unguessed mentality they have assumed—dwell in the universe wherever the universe is habitable.”“I may fall,” said Weston. “But while I live I will not, with such a key in my hand, consent to close the gates of the future on my race. What lies in that future, beyond our present ken, passes imagination to conceive: it is enough for me that there is a Beyond.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1961 Preface
“Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? When I see the temporal suffering of humans who finally escape us, I feel as if I had been allowed to taste the first course of a rich banquet and then denied all the rest. It is worse than not to have tasted it at all. The Enemy, true to His barbarous methods of warfare, allows us to see the short misery of His favourites only to tantalize and torment us — to mock the incessant hunger, which, during this present phase of great conflict, His blockade is admittedly imposing.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence — moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how Democracy (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them ‘tyrants’ then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of corn, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no pre-eminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, ‘democracy’. But now ‘democracy’ can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other — the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow — is a prosaic barbarian. But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man's reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be "debunked", but watch the faces, mark well the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut — whom no rumor of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead — even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served — deny it food and it will gobble poison.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every intrusion of the spirit that says, "I'm as good as you" into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality; but let us undress every night.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it's ill talking of such questions." "Because they are too terrible, Sir?" "No. Because all answers deceive. If ye put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it. But if ye are trying to leap on into Eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. Time is the very lens through which ye see — small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope — something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn't is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it's truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic's vision) that claims to go behind it. For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom.”
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source