Clive Staples Lewis Quotes page 4

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

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

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.”

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

The Weight of Glory (1949)

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

Equality (1943)

“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.”

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

“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.”

Letter VIII
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

“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.”

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

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.”

“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.”

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

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 <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…”

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

The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“Not my idea of God, but God.”

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

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.”

“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.”

Equality (1943)

“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.”

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).

“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.”

Preface
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

“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.”

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

“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.””

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

The Weight of Glory (1949)

“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.”

Letter X
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

“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.””

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

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

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

“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.”

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

Clive Staples Lewis book The Four Loves

The Four Loves (1960)

“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)

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

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