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C. S. Lewis
(Redirected from C.S. Lewis) Clive Staples Lewis (1898 - 1963) Writer
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- "Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result."
- Source: preface to Paradise Lost.
Quotes from his letters
Quotes from his essays
Is Theology Poetry?
- "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."
Quotes from his books
The World's Last Night
- "But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it."
- "I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy."
- "Christian Apocalyptic offers us no such hope. It does not even foretell, (which would be more tolerable to our habits of thought) a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without; an extinguisher popped onto the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain rung down on the play—"Halt!"
- "The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph."
- "The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question "What if this present were the world's last night?" is equally relevant."
- "Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that "this present" might be "the world's last night"; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not."
- "For what comes is Judgment: happy are those whom it finds laboring in their vocations, whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or laying good plans to deliver humanity a hundred years hence from some great evil. The curtain has indeed now fallen. Those pigs will never in fact be fed, the great campaign against White Slavery or Governmental Tyranny will never in fact proceed to victory. No matter; you were at your post when the Inspection came."
The Great Divorce
- "Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows."
The Magician's Nephew
- "He was very sad and he wasn't even sure all the time that he had done the right thing; but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan's eyes he became sure."
- "The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
- Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.
- "But what does it all mean?" asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer. "It means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."
The Horse and His Boy
- "And of course he knew none of the true stories about Aslan, the great Lion, the son of the Emperor-over-sea, the King above all High Kings in Narnia. But after one glance at the Lion's face he slipped out of the saddle and fell at its feet. He couldn't say anything but then he didn't want to say anything, and he knew he needn't say anything."
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
- "There was once a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
- "He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools."
- "Oh, Aslan," said Lucy. "Will you tell us how to get into your country from our world?" "I shall be telling you all the time," said Aslan. "But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder."
- "It isn't Narnia, you know," sobbed Lucy. "It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?" "But you shall meet me, dear one," said Aslan. "Are—are you there too, Sir?" said Edmund. "I am," said Aslan. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."
The Silver Chair
- "If you are thirsty, come and drink." "Are you not thirsty?" said the Lion. "I'm dying of thirst," said Jill. "Then drink," said the Lion. "Will you promise not to—do anything to me, if I do come?" said Jill. "I make no promise," said the Lion. "I daren't come and drink," said Jill. "Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion. "Oh, dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer. "I suppose I must go and look for another stream then." "There is no other stream," said the Lion.
- "You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you," said the Lion.
- "It is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are the most grown-up."
The Weight of Glory
- "Perfect humility dispenses with modesty."
- "As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism."
- "We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship."
- "100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased."
Mere Christianity
- "This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people."
- "Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it."
- "Badness is only spoiled goodness."
- "The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There's not one of them which won't make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn't. If you leave out justice you'll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity" and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man."
The Problem of Pain
- "Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."
- "Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal."
- "Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment."
The Screwtape Letters
- "There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth."
- My dear Wormwood,
I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.
- "Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred."
- There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."
- The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
- Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
- Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies—those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
- There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
The Four Loves
- To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal...
- Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory." Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection - if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.
Letters to Malcolm
- It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
- What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
On Stories
- "...one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality."
- - p. 89 in "Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings."
- "...the imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls." - ibid. (?)
- "The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity." - p. 90
- "...we do not retreat from reality, we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves... By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly." - ibid. (?)
Attributed
- All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
- Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.
- Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
- [God] is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him.
- God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
- Nothing is yet in its true form.
- If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
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