C.S. Lewis Quotes

On the purpose of man and real question we ought all to be asking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9fR1vSxNEQ

On love:

C.S. Lewis's attempt at helping his British readers accept the idea of a jealous, holy God:

If God is Love, he is, by definition something more than mere kindness... He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense...

When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather, then, first begin to care?

In awful and surprising ways, we are objects of his love. You asked for a loving God you have one... not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate... but the consuming fire himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artists's love for his work... providence and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory no only beyond our deserts bu also, except in rare moment of race, beyond our desiring.

On a love that creates and embraces that which harms it:

God who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing... the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a 'host' who deliberately creates his own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and 'take advantage of' him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of love himself, the inventor of all loves.

What we have comes from him:

It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realise for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.