C.S. Lewis 

[ ]'s are editors comments not in original quote.

"As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people, and of course as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that's above you."

"Pride is a spiritual cancer"

"Am I independent? No, for servants are dependent, their world does not revolve around themselves and their interests, but around their masters."

"Pride may act as a check on vanity. The devil loves curing a small fault by giving you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in our pride to cure our vanity."

"The hatred is there – festering, gloating, undisguised – and also we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves. Only after these two admissions have been made can we safely proceed."

"for we find that the work of forgiveness has to be done over and over again."

"when a man dies, "all his thoughts perish""(Psalm 146:4)

"Later, when, after centuries of spiritual training, men have learned to desire and adore God, to pant after Him “as pants the hart”, it is another matter. For then those who love God will desire not only to enjoy Him but “to enjoy Him forever”, and will fear to lose Him."

"In reading about ancient Egypt one gets the impression of a culture in which the main business of life was the attempt to secure the well-being of the dead. It looks as if God did not want the chosen people to follow that example."

"It is even arguable that the moment “Heaven” ceases to mean union with God and “Hell” to mean separation from Him, the belief in either is a mischievous superstition; for then we have, on the one hand, a merely “compensatory” belief (a “sequel” to life’s sad story, in which everything will “come all right”) and, on the other, a nightmare which drives men into asylums or makes them persecutors."

"Most of us find that our belief in the future life is strong only when God is in the centre of our thoughts; that if we try to use the hope of “Heaven” as a compensation (even for the most innocent and natural misery, that of bereavement) it crumbles away."

[On hell]-"Perhaps the divines are appealing, on the level of self-centred prudence and self-centred terror, to a belief which, on that level, cannot really exist as a permanent influence on conduct—though of course it may be worked up for a few excited minutes or even hours."

[I don't celebrate Easter nor was it originally in the scriptures, but this is a good point of view]-If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat."

[Old Testament Prophets]-"These poets knew far less reason than we for loving God. They did not know that He offered them eternal joy; still less that He would die to win it for them."

"None of these new ways is yet so filthy or cruel as some Semitic Paganism. But many of them ignore all individual rights and are already cruel enough. Some give morality a wholly new meaning which we cannot accept, some deny its possibility."

"Here is the perfect band-wagoner. Immediately on the decision “This is a revolting tyranny”, follows the question “How can I as quickly as possible cease to be one of the victims and become one of the tyrants?”

"But I am inclined to think a Christian would be wise to avoid, where he decently can, any meeting with people who are bullies, lascivious, cruel, dishonest, spiteful and so forth. Not because we are “too good” for them. In a sense because we are not good enough. We are not good enough to cope with all the temptations, nor clever enough to cope with all the problems, which an evening spent in such society produces...

And of course, even if we do not seek them out, we shall constantly be in such company whether we wish it or not."

"Cruelty will be slyly advocated by the assumption that its only opposite is “sentimentality”. The very presuppositions of any possible good life—all disinterested motives, all heroism, all genuine forgiveness—will be, not explicitly denied, (for then the matter could be discussed), but assumed to be phantasmal, idiotic, believed in only by children."

"Disagreement can, I think, sometimes be expressed without the appearance of priggery, if it is done argumentatively not dictatorially; support will often come from some most unlikely member of the party, or from more than one, till we discover that those who were silently dissentient were actually a majority. A discussion of real interest may follow. Of course the right side may be defeated in it. That matters very much less than I used to think. The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said."

"What makes this contact with wicked people so difficult is that to handle the situation successfully requires not merely good intentions, even with humility and courage thrown in; it may call for social and even intellectual talents which God has not given us. It is therefore not self-righteousness but mere prudence to avoid it when we can."

"One almost hears the incessant whispering, tattling, lying, scolding, flattery, and circulation of rumours."

"The speaker is obviously referring to an utterly spontaneous impulse, a thing you might find yourself acting upon almost unawares."

"in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men."

"I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game—praise of weather,"

"praise almost seems to be inner health made audible."

"I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. "

"How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints."

"I am not angry — except perhaps for a moment before I come to my senses — with a man who trips me up by accident; I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up even if he does not succeed. Yet the first has hurt me and the second has not."

"You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will."

"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."

"But in real life people are cruel for one of two reasons — either because they are sadists, that is, because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it — money, or power, or safety."

"Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness."

"Enemy-occupied territory — that is what this world is."

[the devil's appearance]-"If anybody really wants to know him better I would say to that person, "Don't worry. If you really want to, you will Whether you'll like it when you do is another question.""

"Because free will though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata — of creatures that worked like machines — would hardly be worth creating."

"The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting Yourself first — wanting to be the centre — wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race."

"Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin."

"Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit."

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person — and he would not need it."

[on repentance]-"If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot hap pen. Very well, then, we must go through with it."

"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."

"In the same way a Christian can lose the Christ — life which has been put into him, and he has to make efforts to keep it."

"He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us;"

"Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever."

"If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. But, fortunately, it works the other way round."