Mere Christianity

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

"Wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way... Evil is a parasite, not an original thing."

"God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage, the play is over....For this time, it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side."

"Sometimes our pride also hinders our charity; we are tempted to spend more than we ought on the showy forms of generosity (tipping, hospitality) and less than we ought on those who really need our help." 

"Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party."

"God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them." (Thank God for that!!)

"All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery... War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken."

"It was through pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle itself into the very center of our religious life... It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly.... The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride."

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next." (Amen!!)

"We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with fact. Of course, anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about."

"Of course, what these people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different: they really mean 'Love is God.'"

"I think that many of us, when Christ has enabled us to overcome one or two sins that were an obvious nuisance, are inclined to feel (though we do not put it into words) that we are now good enough. He has done all we wanted Him to do, and we should be obliged if He would now leave us alone. As we say, 'I never expected to be a saint, I only wanted to be a decent ordinary chap.' And we imagine when we say this that we are being humble....... But the question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us....... We may be content to remain what we call 'ordinary people' but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility; it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania; it is obedience." ❤

"If you are a nice person - if virture comes easily to you - beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own merits what are really God's gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous."

"It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.... As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about, you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether."

"Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."
~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

LOVED this book!