Quotable - Lewis & Tolkien

And what of Lewis is not quotable?  But here are a few on which I am musing this morning...


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...A man's physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist...


  When this joy, this stab of inconsolable longing, is awakened by certain powerful myths or stories, it is evidence that behind these myths there is a true Myth - with a capital "M".
  There is a true Story - with a capital "S" - that really exists.
  The reason for the joy - that it's desirable - is because it's real.  And the reason it's inconsolable is because where you're getting it isn't the True One.
  The true Myth and the real Joy is the original Shout, so to speak, and the stories and the myths that you are reading everyday are echoes...
J.R.R. Tolkien

It was when I was happiest that I longed most...

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...

to find the place where all the beauty came from...

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 worshipers.

For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever’. But we shall then know that these are the same thing.