Home > Work > A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis

A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis QUOTES

A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis QUOTES

1 " I must say my prayers today whether I feel devout or not; but that is only as I must learn my grammar if I am ever to read the poets. "

― C.S. Lewis , A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis

2 " I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. "

― C.S. Lewis , A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis

3 " I perceived (and this was a wonder of wonders) that just as I had been wrong in supposing that I really desired the Garden of the Hesperides, so also I had been equally wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. In a way, I had proved this by elimination. I had tried everything in my own mind and body; as it were, asking myself, 'Is it this you want? Is it this?' Last of all I had asked if Joy itself was what I wanted; and, labelling it 'aesthetic experience', had pretended I could answer Yes. But that answer too had broken down. Inexorably Joy proclaimed, 'You want— I myself am your want of—something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.' I did not yet ask, "Who is the desired? only "What is it? But this brought me already into the region of awe, for I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaims itself sheerly objective. Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired. Surprised by Joy, ch. 14 "

― C.S. Lewis , A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis