HOW ART HELPS

'Art is the poem that finds the words when all other words fail. Art is the painting that knows the colour of our grief. Art is the actor identifies with us and says, "Yes - this is happening and it might not be OK.'"

Alastair Gordon, Why Art Matters, p.92.

BEAUTY & TRUTH

'We often hear it said that all truth is God's truth. By the same token, we might also say that all beauty is God's beauty...'

Alastair Gordon, Why Art Matters, p.78.

CHRISTIANITY & ART

Christianity...never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to remind us about what matters. It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane. It is a mechanism whereby our memories are forcibly jogged about what we should draw away from and be afraid of.'

Alain de Botton in Alastair Gordon, Why Art Matters, p.15.

COULD I BE A WRITER?

'A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?"

"Well," the writer said, "I don't know...Do you like sentences?"

The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of paint."'

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p.70.

THE CHALLENGES OF WRITING

'I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand, and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress can turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a musing on which you one day fastened a halter, but which you now cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You can visit it every day and reassert you mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!"'

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p.52.

THE MANY CURRENCIES OF FRIENDSHIP

'There are many currencies to friendship. We may be drawn to someone who makes us feel bright and hopeful, someone who can always make us laugh. Perhaps there are friendships that are instrumental, where the lure is concrete and the appeal is what they can do for us. There are friends we talk to only about serious things, others who only make sense in the blitzed merriment of deep night. Some friends complete us, whilst others complicate us.'

Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir, p.44.

THE SELF-INTEREST OF CHRISTIAN SELF-SACRIFICE

'The principle runs through life from top to bottom. Give yourself up and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death or your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end; submit every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.225.

THE RESILIENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

'Again and again it has been thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man came to life again. In a sense - and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to them - that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started: and each time, just as they are down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us...'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.222.

THE DAILY STRUGGLE

'...the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to the other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.198.

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE IN A LINE

'God looks at you as if you were a little Christ; Christ stands beside you to turn you into one.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.193.

DRESSING UP AS JESUS TO PRAY

'Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of the Son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.187.

THE TRINITY & PRAYER

'An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God - that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying - the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on - the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to the goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.163.

THE LORD'S SUPPER IS A DIVINE KISS

'If baptism is like a wedding, then communion is like a kiss. It's the reaffirmation of love. Christ comes close to reassure us of his love. He comes close to kiss us.'

Tim Chester, Enjoying God, p.105.

GOD'S SOVERIGNTY OVER SUFFERING

'...he told how he had never known his real father or mother and had been brought up sternly by the fisherman. And then he told the story of his escape and how they were chased by lions and forced to swim for their lives; and of all their dangers in Tashbaan and about his night among the tombs and how the beasts howled at him out of the desert. And he told about the heat and thirst of their desert journey and how they were almost at their goal whenever lion chased them and wounded Aravis. And also, how very long it was since he had had anything to eat.

"I do not call you unfortunate," said the Large Voice.

"Don't you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?"

"There was only one lion," said the Voice.

"What on earth do you mean? I've just told you there were at least two the first night, and -"

"There was only one: but he was swift of foot."

"How do you know?"

"I was the lion." And as Shasta gasped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued. "I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.'"

CS Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, p.129.

GOD THE SCUPLTOR

'This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.159.

FAITH OR WORKS?

'Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious moral effort is the only thing will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith in Christ is the only thing that can save you from despair at this point: and out of that Faith in Him good actions must inevitably come.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.148.

FROM HIM ALL BLESSINGS FLOW

'Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, "Daddy, please give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present." Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child's present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.143.

FAITH DEFINED

'Faith...is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.140.

GOD'S LOVE FOR US MATTERS MOST

'On the whole God's love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair on the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in it's determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to him.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.133.

CHASTITY IS NOT REPRESSION

'When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression. On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue - even attempted virtue - brings light; indulgence brings fog.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.102.

PERSEVERANCE IN GODLINESS

'After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in the worst, for our failures are forgiven. The fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.101.

CHRISTIANITY APPROVES OF THE BODY

'Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body - which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, or beauty and our energy.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.98.

CHRISTIANITY GONE WRONG

'One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons - marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.78.

THE ACCESSIBILITY OF CHRISTIANITY

'...one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.'

CS Lewis, Mere Orthodoxy, p.78.

DON'T BE SCARED OF AUTHORITY

'Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority.'

CS Lewis, Mere Orthodoxy, p.62.

REAL HAPPINESS

'The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.48.

CHURCH AS SABOTAGE

'Enemy-occupied territory - that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in the great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.46.

EVIL IS A PARASITE

'...badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. We call sadism a sexual perversion; but you must have first had the idea of a normal sexuality before you talk of its being perverted...'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.44.

CHRISTIANITY COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MADE UP

'Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing that anyone would have made up.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.41.

BEING TRULY PROGRESSIVE

'We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.28.

ENJOYING GOD

'Our job is to go sunbathing in the Father's love! Close your eyes, sit back in your chair and feel the warmth of his love on your skin.'

Tim Chester, Enjoying God, p.39.

THE WRONG BOOKS

'...Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.'

CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, p.70.