C. S. Lewis on the Search for Beauty

'Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself.

...We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted... Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is... the truest index of our real situation.'

- C. S. Lewis, taken from The Weight of Glory

Don't Be Too Easily Pleased

'Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.'

-C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Jesus is better than sin!

God Satisfies

'The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.... If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly pleasures, and on the other, never to mistake them for something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.'

-C. S. Lewis, taken from book 3 and chapter 10 of Mere Christianity

Being in the Presence of God

'The real test of being in the presence of God, is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small dirty object. It is better to forget yourself altogether.'

-C. S. Lewis

Taken from book 3 and chapter 8 of Mere Christianity

Odd things about the Human Race

'...there [are] two odd things about the human race. First, [we are] haunted by the idea of a sort of behaviour [we] ought to practise, which you might call fair play, or decency, or morality, or the Law of Nature. Second, that we do not in fact do so.'

- C S Lewis, taken from chapter 4 of Mere Christianity