Wednesday, December 08, 2004

The Four Loves

Okay...I just finished reading The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis for the second time (the first time I pretty much skimmed it, bad choice). I typed out my favorite 62 quotes. Then I bolded my top 19 of those. Then I enlarged the text size of the best 7 quotes for YOU! Here they are...

~The moment when one first says, really meaning it, that though he is not “my sort of man” he is a very good man “in his own way” is one of liberation

~If we are any good we must always be working towards the moment at which our pupils are fit to become our critics and rivals.

~The mass of the people, who are never quite right, are never quite wrong.

~If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities.

~There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

~God is a host who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and take advantage of Him.

~No sooner do we believe that God loves us than there is an impulse to believe that He does so, not because He is Love, but because we are intrinsically loveable…We, being better taught, resort to subterfuge. Far be it from us to think that we have virtues for which God could love us. But then, how magnificently we have repented…Thus, depth beneath depth and subtlety beneath subtlety, there remains some lingering idea of our own, our very own, attractiveness.

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