Restraining myself from typing the whole book here, I will instead jot some favorite quotes... well, let's call them "favorite, favorite, favorite quotes," because I have basically highlighted 3/4 of this book so far. So this is me, trying desperately to be selective (a task basically impossible in regards to Lewis). Here goes:
"When pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all."
"You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense... Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."
"The Divine 'goodness' differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning."
"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in Heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.'"
"My conception of love needs correction... Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness... There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it... Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons are punished... If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, inexorable sense."
"We are, not metaphorically, but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the 'intolerable compliment.'"
"It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love, but for less."
"When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some 'disinterested,' because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one."
"God of mere miracle has made Himself able so to hunger and created in Himself that which we can satisfy. If He requires us, the requirement is of His own choosing. If the immutable heart can be grieved by the puppets of its own making, it is Divine Omnipotence, no other, that has so subjected it, freely, and in a humility that passes understanding."
"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him...and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God - though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain."
"We are bidden to 'put on Christ,' to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little."
