Clive Staples Lewis: Trending quotes

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“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”

Clive Staples Lewis

The Weight of Glory (1949)

“If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Miracles

Source: Miracles (1947), Ch. 1: "The Scope of this Book"

“"Milton was right," said my Teacher. "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery."”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

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

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) Ch. 15: Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956)

“My form remains one, though the matter in it changes continually. I am, in that respect, like a curve in a waterfall.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Miracles

Source: Miracles (1947), Ch. 16: "Miracles of the New Creation"

“I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.”

Clive Staples Lewis

On Edmund Spenser and his famous work, in a letter to Arthur Greeves (7 March 1916), published in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis : Family Letters, 1905–1931 (2004) edited by Walter Hooper, p. 170

“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.”

Clive Staples Lewis

The Weight of Glory (1949)

“Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Equality (1943)

“Are the gods not just?'
'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”

Clive Staples Lewis

Orual & The Fox
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)

“Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter VIII
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Martin Luther, quoted at the beginning of The Screwtape Letters
Misattributed

“What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H. C. F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Abolition of Man

The Abolition of Man (1943)

“If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

“A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 8, &quot;The Great Sin&quot; http://books.google.com/books?id=OF-YSMKCVwMC&amp;q=%22A+proud+man+is+always+looking+down+on+things+and+people+and+of+course+as+long+as+you+are+looking+down+you+cannot+see+something+that+is+above+you%22&amp;pg=PA124#v=onepage <br class="br">Mere Christianity (1952)

“Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Preface to Paradise Lost

A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), Chapter 2: "Is Criticism Possible?"

“Our father was married twice,' continued Humanist. 'Once to a lady named Epichaerecacia, and afterwards to Euphuia…”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“Ah, Psyche," I said, "have I made you so little happy as that?”

Clive Staples Lewis

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

“Not my idea of God, but God.”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed (1961)

“When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other — the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow — is a prosaic barbarian. But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Equality (1943)