1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Clive Staples Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis Quotes
page 4

Clive Staples Lewis was a British writer and lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Oxford University and Cambridge University . He is best known for his works of fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.

Lewis and fellow novelist J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends. They both served on the English faculty at Oxford University and were active in the informal Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. According to Lewis's memoir Surprised by Joy, he was baptised in the Church of Ireland, but fell away from his faith during adolescence. Lewis returned to Anglicanism at the age of 32, owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, and he became an "ordinary layman of the Church of England". Lewis's faith profoundly affected his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.

Lewis wrote more than 30 books which have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies. The books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have sold the most and have been popularised on stage, TV, radio, and cinema. His philosophical writings are widely cited by Christian apologists from many denominations.

In 1956, Lewis married American writer Joy Davidman; she died of cancer four years later at the age of 45. Lewis died on 22 November 1963 from kidney failure, one week before his 65th birthday. In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis was honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. Wikipedia  

✵ 29. November 1898 – 22. November 1963   •   Other names C.S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis photo
Clive Staples Lewis: 272   quotes 11   likes

Clive Staples Lewis Quotes

“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)

Knowledge , Time

“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"

Change

“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

Books , Hope

“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)

Peaceful , God , Peace , Happiness

“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)

God

“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)

Universe

“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

Way

“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)

Men , World , Universe

“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

Books , Reality , Evil , Horse

“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, "The Great Sin" http://books.google.com/books?id=OF-YSMKCVwMC&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&pg=PA124#v=onepage
Mere Christianity (1952)

People

“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)

Happiness

“Not my idea of God, but God.”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed (1961)

God , Idea

“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)

Hate , Disease , Democracy

“I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In other words, it forbids wholesome doubt. […]
This false certainty comes out in Professor Haldane's article. […] It is breaking Aristotle's canon—to demand in every enquiry that the degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not on your life to pretend that you see further than you do.
Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organisation will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi.”

Clive Staples Lewis

The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.
"A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946), published posthumously in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966)
Some of these ideas were included in the essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949) (see below).

Life , Men , People , Truth

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Preface
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Love , Men , Age , World

“He came in sight of a pass guarded by armed men. ‘you cannot pass … Do you not know that all this country belongs to the Spirit of the Age? … Here Enlightenment, take this fugitive to our Master.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 44–45
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Men , Age , Country

“A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can't quite place. I think the something is 'the whole quality of life as we actually experience it.”

Clive Staples Lewis

C. S. Lewis' Letters to Children – letter to Lucy (11 September 1958)

Life , Flowers , Thinking

“You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father—who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third—”Oh you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.””

Clive Staples Lewis

That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.
"Bulverism" (1941)

Truth , Age , World , Parting

“If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 22
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as “the journey homeward to habitual self.” You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: “Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”

Clive Staples Lewis

The Weight of Glory (1949)

God , Pain , Secret , World

“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter X
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

“Savage – There is only one way fit for a man – Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 100
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

People , Way

“The wraith of Sigmund said. “You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity.””

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 168
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Time

“He begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth-century Rationalism Which can explain away religion by any number of methods.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 19–20
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Religion , Thinking

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Four Loves

The Four Loves (1960)

Friendship , For Friend , For Bestfriend , God

“I am to talk about Apologetics. Apologetics means of course Defence. The first question is — what do you propose to defend? Christianity, of course…”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"Christian Apologetics" (1945), p. 89
God in the Dock (1970)

Question

“Then I dreamed that one day there was nothing but milk for them and the jailer said as he put down the pipkin: ‘Our relations with the cow are not delicate-as you can easily see if you imagine eating any of her other secretions.’ … John said, ‘Thank heavens! Now at last I know that you are talking nonsense. You are trying to pretend that unlike things are like. You are trying to make us think that milk is the same sort of thing as sweat or dung.’ ‘And pray, what difference is there except by custom?’ ‘Are you a liar or only a fool, that you see no difference between that which Nature casts out as refuse and that which she stores up as food?”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 49
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Secret , Food , Dreams , Fools

“I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Letter (19 April 1951); published in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 230

God , Forgiveness , Thinking

“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only—and that is to support the ultimate career.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Paraphrased from a letter C. S. Lewis wrote to Mrs. Johnson on March 16, 1955: "A housewife's work [is] surely, in reality, the most important work in the world ... your job is the one for which all others exist", as reported in The Misquotable C.S. Lewis (2018) by William O'Flaherty, p. 63
Misattributed

Family , Support

“The devil…the prowde spirit…cannot endure to be mocked.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Thomas More, quoted at the beginning of The Screwtape Letters
Misattributed

“It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1963)

“Mr. Sensible learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 176
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Friendship , Learning

“There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Preface
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Hell , Thinking

“I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Letters of C. S. Lewis (17 July 1953), para. 2, p. 251 — as reported in The Quotable Lewis (1989), p. 334

“Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal…. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter VIII
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

World , Time , Animals

“The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered. For all its vast spaces it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered by-ways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Discarded Image

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964)

Way , Imagination , Affliction

“The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter XV
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

God , Time

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book I, Chapter 1, "The Law of Human Nature"
Mere Christianity (1952)

People

“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

Men , God

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Letters of C. S. Lewis (29 April 1959), para. 1, p. 285 — as reported in The Quotable Lewis (1989), p. 469

God , Pain

“Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

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

Love , God , Hell

“A sensible human once said, "If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit"; and again, "She's the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression."”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter XXVI
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

People , Feeling

“The chief pleasure of his life in these days was to go down the road and look through the window in the wall in the hope of seeing the beautiful Island. … the sight of the Island and the sounds became very rare … and the yearning for the sight … became so terrible that John thought he would die if he did not have them again soon. … it came into his head that he might perhaps get the old feeling-for what, he thought, had the Island ever given him but a feeling?–by imagining. He shut his eyes and set his teeth again and made a picture of the Island in his mind.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 12–13
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Life , Pleasure , Beauty , Hope

“A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis.”

Clive Staples Lewis

"Haggard Rides Again", in Time and Tide, Vol. XLI (3 September 1960)

“The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”

Clive Staples Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia

The Magician's Nephew (1955), Ch. 10: The First Joke and Other Matters
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956)

Stupidity

“"Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?"
"Hush," he said sternly. "Do not blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind — ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind — is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly."”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

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

People , Hell , Reality