C. S. Lewis Quotes About Earth
-
To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is 'remains.'
→ -
Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question "What on earth is he up to now?" will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.
→ -
All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
→ -
Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord. J.I. Packer Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.
→ -
The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.
→ -
We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.
→ -
He wondered how he could ever have thought of the planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.
→ -
You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.
→ -
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
→ -
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.
→ -
If the universe is so bad...how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?
→ -
Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to believe in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it.
→ -
The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their Mother and from the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far the East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus.
→ -
Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
→ -
A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. It was hardly a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
→ -
Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my conversion. Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?
→ -
The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth-- the very thing the whole story has been about.
→ -
Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work build up in him a sense of being really at home on earth which is just what we want.
→ -
Is any pleasure on Earth as great as a circle of Christian friends?
→ -
No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
→ -
Though under earth, and throneless now I be Yet while I lived all earth was under me.
→ -
He is not the soul of Nature, nor any part of Nature. He inhabits eternity: He dwells in a high and holy place: heaven is His throne, not his vehicle, earth is his footstool, not his vesture. One day he will dismantle both and make a new heaven and earth. He is not to be identified even with the 'divine spark' in man. He is 'God and not man.
→ -
The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.
→ -
I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell; and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.
→ -
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens - at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.
→ -
No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'.
→ -
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
→ -
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.
→
Related Authors
-
Timothy Keller Author -
Georgie Henley Film actress -
Evelyn Waugh Writer -
Lucy Maud Montgomery Author -
J. R. R. Tolkien Writer -
Charles Dickens Writer -
Joy Davidman Poet -
T. S. Eliot Playwright -
H. G. Wells Writer -
J. K. Rowling Novelist -
George MacDonald Author -
Skandar Keynes Actor -
Stephen King Author -
Gilbert K. Chesterton Writer -
Douglas Gresham Film actor -
Cassandra Clare Author -
Lewis Carroll Writer -
George R. R. Martin Novelist -
George Eliot Novelist -
Aldous Huxley Writer