Clive Staples Lewis Quotes (272 quotes, page 5)

Letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950), quoted in Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (2001) by Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, p. 393 http://books.google.com/books?id=8ZfLXXLZM9UC&pg=PA393&dq=%22I+believe+Buddhism+to+be+a+simplification+of+Hinduism+and+Islam+to+be+a+simplification+of+Xianity.%22

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

Clive Staples Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Dedication: "To Lucy Barfield"
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956)

Reading

“Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Foreword to Joy Davidman's Smoke on the Mountain (1954)

“… in such a matter he would never have been guided by his first thoughts (which would probably have been right) nor even by his twenty-first (which would have at least been explicable). Beyond doubt he would have prolonged deliberation till his hundred-and-first; and they would be infallibly and invincibly wrong. This is what always happens to the deliberations of a simple man who thinks he is a subtle one.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

Thinking

“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter XII
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Hell

“It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness and chivalry “masculine” when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as “feminine.””

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed (1961)

“Badness is only spoiled goodness.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book II, Chapter 2, "The Invasion"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

Clive Staples Lewis

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

Men , God , Art , Soul

“And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and, oh, gloriously she did) it was for another’s sake. The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming. The pillars on the far side of the pool flushed with his approach. I cast down my eyes.”

Clive Staples Lewis

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

Beauty , Star , Sun

“Looking for God—or Heaven—by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.”

Clive Staples Lewis

"The Seeing Eye", in Christian Reflections (1967), p. 167

God , Hope , Sense , Reading

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may 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. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949), p. 292
Similar statements were included in "A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946) (see above), published posthumously.
God in the Dock (1970)

Age , Disease , Exercises , Hell

“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

Life , Nature , Suffering

“The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. Of that larger script part is already visible, part is still unsolved. In other words, some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"Miracles" (1942), p. 29
God in the Dock (1970)

God , Universe , Sense , World

“They have an engine called the Press whereby the people are deceived.”

Clive Staples Lewis book That Hideous Strength

Source: That Hideous Strength (1945), Ch. 13 : They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads

People

“The Guide sang: The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, And fools crying, Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun! The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run Faster for ever, The old age is done, We have new lights and see without the sun.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?
Pilgrim’s Regress 186–187
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

Light , Sun , Fools , Art

“But what of the poor Ghosts who never get into the omnibus at all?”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

'Everyone who wishes it does. Never fear. There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.'

Ch. 9, p. 72; part of this has also been rendered in a variant form, and quoted as:
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 Great Divorce (1944–1945)