Pilgrim's Regress Quotes

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.

You all know," said the Guide, "that security is mortals' greatest enemy.

Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place – to one friend rather than another and one shire more than all the land.

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

The great art of life is to moderate our passions. 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.

There is no excess of goodness. You cannot go too far in the right direction.

You will find your Island here. But how can it be here in the middle of the city? -It needs no place. It is everywhere and nowhere. It refuses entry to none who asks. It is an Island of the Soul.

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.

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

But I must think it is one or the other.' [Reason]: 'By my father's soul, you must not - until you have some evidence. Can you not remain in doubt?' [John]: 'I don't know that I have ever tried.' [Reason]: 'You must learn to, if you are to come far with me. It is not hard to do it. In Eschropolis, indeed, it is impossible, for the people who live there have to give an opinion once a week or once a day, or else Mr. Mammon would soon cut off their food. But out here in the country you can walk all day and all the next day with an unanswered question in your head: you need never speak until you have made up your mind.

All the furniture of his mind was taken away.

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. After

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All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.

Book Ten; Chapter Six; Ignorantia "There must be a good side somewhere to this revolution," said Vertue. "It is too solid--it looks too lasting--to be a mere evil. I cannot believe that the Landlord would otherwise allow the whole face of nature and the whole structure of life to be so permanently and radically changed." The Guide laughed. "You are falling into their own error," he said, "the change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught--an inability to disbelieve advertisements. To be sure, if the machines did what they promised, the change would be very deep indeed. Their next war, for example, would change the state of their country from disease to death. They are afraid of this themselves--though most of them are old enough to know by experience that a gun is no more likely than a toothpaste or a cosmetic to do the things its makers say it will do. It is the same with all their machines. 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 time have banished leisure from their country. There will be no radical change. And as for permanence--consider how quickly all machines are broken and obliterated. The black solitudes will some day be green again, and of all cities that I have seen these iron cities will break most suddenly.

The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

C'è chi ha ritenuto che tutti questi amori fossero copie del nostro amore per il Signore". "Ma certamente l'avranno considerato e respinto. Le loro scienza l'hanno confutato". "Non hanno potuto farlo perché le loro scienze non sono per nulla interessate nelle relazioni generali di questo paese per alcuna cosa che possa trovarsi a oriente o a occidente di esso. Ti diranno sicuramente che le loro ricerche hanno provato che se due cose sono similari, quella bella è sempre la copia di quella brutta. Ma l'unica loro ragione nel fare questa affermazione è che hanno già deciso che la cosa più bella di tutte-cioè a dire il Signore e, se vuoi, le montagne e l'Isola-non sono altro che una copia di questo paese. Hanno la presunzione che le loro ricerche cunducano a quella dottrina; ma in effetti, danno per scontata prima di tutto quella dottrina ed interpretano le loro ricerche a partire da essa". "Ma hanno delle buone ragioni per ritenerlo". "Non ne hanno nessuna, perché hanno smesso di dare ascolto alle sole persone che possono dire alcunché sull'argomento". "Chi sono queste persone?" "Sono due mie sorelle, più giovani di me, e i loro nomi sono Filosofia e Teologia". "Sorelle! E chi è vostro padre?" "Lo saprai più presto di quel che credi".

Of course I know that the Enemy also wants to detach men from themselves, but in a different way. Remember always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever. Hence, while He is delighted to see them sacrificing even their innocent wills to His, He hates to see them drifting away from their own nature for any other reason. And we should always encourage them to do so. The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human’s own real likings and dislikings. I myself would carry this very far. I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such

From Little Lea, the young Lewis could see the distant Castlereagh Hills, which seemed to speak to him of something of heartrending significance, lying tantalizingly beyond his reach. They became a symbol of liminality, of standing on the threshold of a new, deeper, and more satisfying way of thinking and living. An unutterable sense of intense longing arose within him as he contemplated them. He could not say exactly what it was that he longed for, merely that there was a sense of emptiness within him, which the mysterious hills seemed to heighten without satisfying. In The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), these hills reappear as a symbol of the heart’s unknown desire. But if Lewis was standing on the threshold of something wondrous and enticing, how could he enter this mysterious realm? Who would open the door and allow him through? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the image of a door became increasingly significant to Lewis’s later reflections on the deeper questions of life. The low, green line of the Castlereagh Hills, though actually quite close, thus came to be a symbol of something distant and unattainable. These hills were, for Lewis, distant objects of desire, marking the end of his known world, from which the whisper of the haunting “horns of elfland” could be heard. “They taught me longing—Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.

The chronology which I propose, based on a close reading of the primary sources, is as follows: March–June 1930: Lewis comes to believe in God. 19 September 1931: A conversation with Tolkien leads Lewis to realise that Christianity is a “true myth.” 28 September 1931: Lewis comes to believe in the divinity of Christ while being driven to Whipsnade Zoo. 1 October 1931: Lewis tells Arthur Greeves that he has “passed over” from belief in God to belief in Christ. 15–29 August 1932: Lewis describes his intellectual journey to God in The Pilgrim’s Regress, written at this time in Belfast.

Is this simply because the majority are hide-bound? I think not. They have a good reason for their conservatism. Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they don’t go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore.