C. S. Lewis Quotes

Inaction may be the biggest form of action.

People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.

The futility of action does not absolve one from the failure to act. -

Emotion without action is irrelevant.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.

He has sat on the fence so long that the iron has entered his soul.

The worst thing we can do is to do nothing.

The only risk we run is by doing nothing.

Awareness without action is worthless.

Not to decide is to decide.

I'm growing very talented at watching blood and guts on screen because I have zero emotional response.

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.

I'm too tired most of the time. Why do I have to take a stand on everything? Sometimes, I'm just not mad at it.

Sometimes inaction is worse than action.

When one does nothing, one believes oneself responsible for everything.

The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all.

And action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.

Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.

Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it. "He who desires but acts not," wrote Blake with his accustomed vigor, "Breeds pestilence.

So she became impulsive, scared by her inaction into perpetual action. When the Eagle confronted her with the expulsion, maybe she blurted out Marya's name because it was the first that came to mind, because in that moment she didn't want to get expelled and she couldn't think past that moment. She was scared, sure. But more importantly, maybe she'd been scared of being paralyzed by fear again. ~Miles/Pudge on Alaska, pg 120-121

It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering

The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in; becoming narcissistic.