The Pilgrim's Regress

by C.S. Lewis

Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not.

They pretend that their researches lead to that doctrine: but in fact they assume that doctrine first and interpret their researches by it.’

‘But this is how business is managed,’ said Mother Kirk. ‘The little people do not know the big people to whom they belong. The big people do not intend that they should.

Objects of affection are like other belongings. We must love them enough to enrich our lives while we have them—not enough to impoverish our lives when they are gone.

And there fell upon John that last loneliness which comes when the comforter himself needs comforting, and the guide is to be guided.

What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.

the legend of the Landlord’s Son. They say that after the eating of the mountain-apple and the earthquake, when things in our country had gone all awry, the Landlord’s Son himself became one of his Father’s tenants and lived among us, for no other purpose than that he should be killed.

Do you not know how it is with love? First comes delight: then pain: then fruit. And then there is joy of the fruit, but that is different again from the first delight. And mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step: for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair. You must not try to keep the raptures: they have done their work. Manna kept, is worms.

‘You all know,’ said the Guide, ‘that security is mortals’ greatest enemy.’

‘But surely the Landlord can do anything?’ ‘He cannot do what is contradictory: or, in other words, a meaningless sentence will not gain meaning simply because someone chooses to prefix to it the words “the Landlord can.” And it is meaningless to talk of forcing a man to do freely what a man has freely made impossible for himself.’

Fighting one vice with another is about the most dangerous strategy there is.

Their labour-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving them have banished leisure from their country.

‘Passing to-day by a cottage, I shed tears When I remembered how once I had dwelled there With my mortal friends who are dead. Years Little had healed the wound that was laid bare.