1963年11月22日是一個值得紀念的日子。美國第35任總統約翰肯尼迪（John F. Kennedy）在這一天被暗殺身亡。«美麗新世界»（Brave New World）作者Aldous Leonard Huxley 和基督教思想家C. S. Lewis也在同一天逝世。
因著《納尼亞王國》 (The Chronicles of Narnia) 的上映，很多人認識了它的作者——C. S. Lewis。但他不僅是童書作家，他同時擁有三種身份（也被稱為“三個C.S.Lewis”）：第一，他是牛津和劍橋大學著名的文學批評家和教授（中世紀及文藝復興時期英語文學教授）；第二，他是廣受好評的奇幻小說和兒童文學作家；第三，他是知名的基督教神學作家和護教家。
今天適逢C. S. Lewis逝世50週年，我們特選輯他最廣為人知的20句話，是為紀念。
【 論基督教 】
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
有限的人可以提出連上帝也無法回答的問題嗎？我想，這一點也不困難，因為所有無稽之問都是無法回答的。
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
我尋找宗教，並不是因為它能讓我快樂。我向來知道，一瓶酒已經能夠讓我開心。如果你想尋找一個令自己感覺舒服的宗教，那麼我肯定不會推薦基督教。
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
尋找真理，你最終或可以找到安慰；尋找安慰，你既得不到安慰，也得不到真理，只会在開始階段得到一些泡沫和不實際的思想，和最終徹底的失望。
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
如果整個宇宙沒有意義，我們就從來不會發現它沒有意義。正如，如果這宇宙沒有光，那生物也不會有眼睛，我們也察覺不出黑暗，而黑暗本身根本也沒有任何意義。
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.
如果我們發現自己內心有一個渴望，不是這世間所能滿足的，最可能的解釋是，我們的存在是為了另一世界。
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
我在這裡試圖讓人避免說一些对耶稣的认识缺乏智慧的话，儘管別人經常這樣說：”我愿意承认耶稣是一位伟大的道德教师，但我不能接受他自以為是上帝的宣稱。”这樣的话不应該出自我们的口。一个人，若他只是凡人，卻说出像耶稣说的那些话，决不可能是一個伟大的道德教师。要麼，他是個瘋子，就像说自己是个滷蛋的人那樣；要不然，他就是來自地狱的魔鬼。你得自己作决定，要麼，相信这耶稣在當時和现在都是上帝的儿子；要不然，就得相信這人是個疯子，或是比疯子更坏的东西。你可以当他是個笨蛋，叫他闭嘴；你也可以吐唾沫在他身上，把他当妖魔宰了；你也可以俯伏在他的脚前，称他为主、为上帝。但千万别自作聰明、自以为是地把他当作一位伟大的教师。他没有給我们这样说他的可能性，他根本不容許我們這麼做。
Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.
人不是宇宙的中心。上帝不是為了人而存在，人也不是為了自己而存在。
【 論信仰生活 】
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.
我相信基督教，正如我相信太陽已經升上來了一樣：這並不只是因為我看見了它，而是因為通過它，我看見了一切事物。
A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.
一個冷漠、自義的道學先生，儘管經常上教堂，他可能比一個妓女更接近地獄。
Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.
那些恨惡良善的人，有時倒比那些對良善一無所知卻又自命良善的人，更接近良善。
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
就幻想你自己是一幢住家房屋吧，上帝来要重建这屋。起初你或許能明白祂在做什麼，祂修整沟渠，将屋顶的漏补好，这些你都知道是应该做的，因此不觉得有什么希奇。但祂随即对整幢房子敲敲打打，每一動作都令你極度痛苦，看不出當中有什麼意義。祂到底在干什么呀？答案是，祂要建造一幢和你所想的完全不同的房屋，在这边建一座新翼，在那里加多一层，築高塔，建庭苑。你以为祂要造一间小莊園，但原來祂要建造王宫，因為祂打算自己來住在其中。
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
成為一個基督徒，就是寬恕那不可寬恕的，因為神已經寬恕了你生命裡不可寬恕的一切。
The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.
這世界並不是由百分百的基督徒和百分百的非基督徒所組成。這當中有人，許許多多稱呼自己是基督徒的人，包括一些神職人員，但卻緩慢地不再是基督徒；這當中也有不自認為基督徒的人，卻是逐漸地成為基督徒。
【 論愛、勇氣、痛苦 】
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.
去愛，就會受到傷害。愛任何事物，你的心就會有苦惱、會傷痛。如果你想保護你的心不受任何傷害，你必須什麼都不愛，甚至連動物也不行，你要用很多的嗜好及享受，把它小心翼翼地包裹起來，避免任何情感上的牽掛；把你的心完全封鎖在自我中心的棺木裡。然而在那裡，安全、黑暗、穩定、真空，心卻變了質。它不會收到傷害，但卻會變得堅硬不破、麻木不仁、不可救藥。
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
基督徒不認為，因為我們是良善的，所以上帝愛我們；而是因為祂愛我們，他使我們成為良善的。
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, most inexorable sense.
如果上帝是愛，那麼就定義上說，祂遠遠不只是仁慈的。從所有的記載都可以看到，儘管祂經常訓斥我們、譴責我們，但祂從不輕視我們。祂愛人，給予人不可承受的尊重，是最為深沉、最具悲情，同時是無可抗拒的愛。
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
勇氣不只是一個德行，它是每一個德行在受嚴謹考驗時刻所呈現的形式。
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
上帝在我們的歡愉中對我們低語，通過我們的良心向我們說話，但卻在我們的痛苦中大聲疾呼：痛苦原來是神的揚聲器，為要喚醒充耳不聞的眾生。
【 論教育 】
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
教育若失去了價值觀的層次，不管它多麼有用，都只能塑造一個更聰明的妖魔。
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
在文學和藝術的創作中，誰拘泥於原創性，誰就不可能原創。然而，如果你單純地嘗試說出真理，一點都不在乎它是否被說過多少次，十之八九你正在原創中而不自知。
