Clive Staples Lewis: Trending quotes (page 7)

“John – I’m trying to find the Island in the West. Sensible – You refer, no doubt to some aesthetic experience.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 77
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter I
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Way , Reading

“The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.”

Clive Staples Lewis

As quoted in part 2 of Sherwood Eliot Wirt in "The Final Interview of C. S. Lewis" (1963) http://www1.cbn.com/narnia/the-final-interview-of-c.-s.-lewis

Way , Thinking , Personality

“As image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"Priestesses in the Church?" (1948), p. 237
God in the Dock (1970)

Soul

“Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"
Mere Christianity (1952)

Christ

“If we cannot "practice the presence of God," it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep. Bur for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Four Loves

"Charity"
The Four Loves (1960)

God , World , Dreams , Feeling

“I have always — at least, ever since I can remember — had a kind of longing for death.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Psyche
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)

Death

“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Letter (8 November 1952); published in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 247

God , Teachers , Reading , Christ

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

God , Pain , Pleasure , World

“Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food more than another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed (1961)

Food

“What can you ever really know of other people's souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book IV, Chapter 10, "Nice People or New Men"
Mere Christianity (1952)

God , Fate , People , Books

“'God!' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape.
'God what?' asked the Spirit.
'What do you mean, "God what"?' asked the Ghost.
'In our grammar God is a noun' said the Spirit.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9

God

“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Letter to Arthur Greeves (29 December 1935) — in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963) (1979), p. 477

Life , Friendship , Thinking , Happiness

“Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

Love

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere… God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Source: Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 191

God , Reading

“"I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment…"”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 8

Happiness

“In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

God , Forgiveness , Hell , Question

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1963)

God , Feeling , Support

“Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul—nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that.”

Clive Staples Lewis book That Hideous Strength

Source: That Hideous Strength (1945), Ch. 16 : Banquet at Belbury, section 6

Death , Hate , World , Soul

“[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9

Death , Pleasure , Dreams , Suffering