C. S. Lewis Quotes About Enemies

• God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form...The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.

  C. S. Lewis

  Faith, Men, Perfect

• Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

  C. S. Lewis

  Loss, Evil, Decision

  "The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics".

• Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself. In reality, because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must, even more wholeheartedly than they, invoke the divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet. For consider how narrow its true path is. Is must not become what the people call a "mutual admiration society"; yet if it is not full of mutual admiration, of Appreciative love, it is not Friendship at all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Spiritual, Sweet, Reality

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.100, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• To be ignorant and simple now-not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground-would be to throw down our weapons and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

  C. S. Lewis

  Philosophy, Simple, Intellectual

• The enemy will not see you vanish into God's company without an effort to reclaim you.

  C. S. Lewis

  Effort, Enemy, Company

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950 - 1963”, p.106, Harper Collins

• If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wisdom, Struggle, Cutting

• If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

  C. S. Lewis

  Prayer, Order, House

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Mere Christianity”, p.10, HarperCollins UK

• 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 to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

  C. S. Lewis

  Kings, Enemy, Campaigns

  C.S. Lewis (1960). “Mere Christianity”

• The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality of whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them.

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Reality, Two

• Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

  C. S. Lewis

  Enemy, Looks, Letters

  C. S. LEWIS (1961). “The Screwtape Letters & Screwtape Proposes a Toast”

• He who has not forgiven an enemy has never yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.

  C. S. Lewis

  Life, Forgiveness, Sublime

• Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Destiny, Knights

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories”, p.43, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.

  C. S. Lewis

  Intellectual, Secret, Listening

  C. S. Lewis (2010). “A Year with C. S. Lewis: 365 Daily Readings from his Classic Works”, HarperCollins UK

• God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.

  C. S. Lewis

  Fun, Thinking, People

  "Mere Christianity" by C. S. Lewis, Book I, Chapter 5, ("We Have Cause to Be Uneasy"), 1952.

• There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Thinking, Focus

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.149, Simon and Schuster

• Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man's functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.

  C. S. Lewis

  Dog, Cat, Animal

• The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.

  C. S. Lewis

  Time, Enemy, Screwtape Letters

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “Image and Imagination”, p.352, Cambridge University Press

• Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us-to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Support, Political

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “That Hideous Strength”, p.97, Simon and Schuster

• The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt - even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called.

  C. S. Lewis

  Hurt, Thinking, Enemy

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “Studies in Words”, p.122, Cambridge University Press

• The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents--or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Elephants, Design

• Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s (God’s) ground…He [God] made the pleasure: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He [God] has forbidden.

  C. S. Lewis

  Healthy, Enemy, Degrees

• I'm hunger. I'm thirst. Where I bite, I hold till I die, and even after death they must cut out my mouthful from my enemy's body and bury it with me. I can fast a hundred years and not die. I can lie a hundred nights on the ice and not freeze. I can drink a river of blood and not burst. Show me your enemies.

  C. S. Lewis

  Lying, Cutting, Night

  C.S.Lewis (2016). “The Chronicles of Narnia Vol II: Prince Caspian”, p.120, ENRICH CULTURE GROUP LIMITED

• I have seen something like it happen in battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped out cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face - friends for a moment - and then at once enemies again and forever.

  C. S. Lewis

  Eye, Fighting, Men

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

  C. S. Lewis

  Enemy, Guides, Said

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.163, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Believe, Humility

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