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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. Lewis1898–1963“Vivisection” (1947), p. 227
We all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men ‘after our own heart.’ Only they really know our mind and only they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread. The little pockets of early Chrstians survived because they cared exclusively for the love of ‘the bretheren’ and stopped their ears to the opinion of the Pagan society around them. But a circle of criminals, cranks, or perverts survives in just the same way; by becoming deaf to the opinion of the outer world, by discounting it as the chatter of outsiders who ‘don’t understand,’ of the ‘conventional,’ the ‘bourgeois,’ the ‘Establishment,’ of prigs, prudes, and humbugs.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963
Many things⁠—such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly⁠—are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?
C. S. Lewis1898–1963A Preface to Paradise Lost
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. Lewis1898–1963A Grief Observed (1961), Pt. I
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963A Grief Observed
There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963An Experiment in Criticism
The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963The Weight of Glory
The more often a man feels without acting, the less he’ll be able to act. And in the long run, the less he’ll be able to feel.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963
Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963A Preface to Paradise Lost
People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865
You say you are conservative — eminently conservative — while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865The Cooper Union Address (1860)
- Change
- Politics
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress (1862)
- Change
- Thinking