Another November Birthday

As it turns out, November includes not only the birthdate of our own Anonymiss,  but someone else almost as famous, but not nearly as vivacious: C.S. Lewis, you was born on this date in 1898.

It's apropos of nothing political in particular, but while most people know him simply for his Narnia books, he was a well known, well respected Christian apologist, whose work has provided information and inspiration to generations.

He started, as so many of us do, rebelling against our respective churches and choosing atheism instead, describing himself as "very angry with God for not existing."

I'd just like to steal a few quotes to share with you, to help you through your day.

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

"Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither."

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."

"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."

"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."

"Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ."

"This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted."

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this."

"The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word ‘love’ and look on things as if man were the centre of them.”