Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

by C.S. Lewis

Hence while friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.

We have learned not to take present things at their face value.

Worst of all, there was my face.

The World will lead you only to Hell; but sodomy may lead you to jail and create a scandal, and lose you your job. The World, to do it justice, seldom does that.

I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.

I was to games, as the proverb has it, like an ass to the harp.

Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.

Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.

As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful valley of Ezekiel’s, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its gravecloths, and stood upright and became a living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my ‘Spirit’ differed in some way from ‘the God of popular religion’. My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, ‘I am the Lord’; ‘I am that I am’; ‘I am.’

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

But though I liked clergymen as I liked bears, I had as little wish to be in the Church as in the zoo.