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Clive Staples Lewis Quotes
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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 quotes11 likes

Clive Staples Lewis Quotes

“I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 11, "Faith"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“A man, an adult, is precisely what [Aeneas] is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy.”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Preface to Paradise Lost

A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), Chapter 6: "Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic"

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed (1961)

“I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.”

Clive Staples Lewis

The World's Last Night (1952)

“There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book I, Chapter 4, "What Lies behind the Law"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“For what comes is Judgment: happy are those whom it finds labouring in their vocations, whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or laying good plans to deliver humanity a hundred years hence from some great evil. The curtain has indeed now fallen. Those pigs will never in fact be fed, the great campaign against White Slavery or Governmental Tyranny will never in fact proceed to victory. No matter; you were at your post when the Inspection came.”

Clive Staples Lewis

The World's Last Night (1952)

“We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Four Loves

Introduction
The Four Loves (1960)

“If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

“But supposing one tries to live by Pantheistic philosophy? Does it lead to a complacent Hegelian optimism?”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 132–133
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question "What if this present were the world's last night?"”

Clive Staples Lewis

is equally relevant.
The World's Last Night (1952)

“Mr. Neo-Angular – I am doing my duty. My ethics are based on dogma, not on feeling. Vertue – I know that a rule is to be obeyed because it is a rule and not because it appeals to my feelings at the moment.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 90
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend.”

Clive Staples Lewis

The Funeral of a Great Myth (1967)

“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 11

“The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

“If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.”

Clive Staples Lewis

The Weight of Glory (1949)

“Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

Source: A Grief Observed (1961), Ch. 1

“The First [Friend] is the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights. There is nothing to be overcome in making him your friend; he and you join like raindrops on a window. But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything… Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. he has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one… How can he be so nearly right, and yet, invariably, just not right? He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Abolition of Man

The Abolition of Man (1943)

“The Guide sang: Nearly they stood who fall; Themselves as they look back See always in the track The one false step, where all Even yet, by lightest swerve Of foot not yet enslaved, By smallest tremor of the smallest nerve, Might have been saved. Nearly they fell who stand, And with cold after fear Look back to mark how near They grazed the Siren’s land, Wondering that subtle fate, By threads so spidery fine, The choice of ways so small, the event so great, Should thus entwine. Therefore oh, man, have fear Lest oldest fears be true, Lest thou too far pursue The road that seems so clear, And step, secure, a hair-breadth bourne, Which, being once crossed forever unawares, Denies return.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 181
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may 'conquer' them.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Abolition of Man

The Abolition of Man (1943)

“This is where dreams—dreams, do you understand—come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.”

Clive Staples Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), Ch. 12: The Dark Island
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956)

“The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book IV, Chapter 8, "Is Christianity Hard or Easy?"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“"The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.'”

Clive Staples Lewis book That Hideous Strength

There is consequently a phatic hiatus."
Source: That Hideous Strength (1945), Ch. 8 : Moonlight at Belbury, section 2

“Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.”

Clive Staples Lewis

The Weight of Glory (1949)

“When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Preface
Mere Christianity (1952)

“you must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.’ ‘Some that thought that all these loves were copies of our love for the landlord.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 59
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Perelandra

Perelandra (1943)

“It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.”

Clive Staples Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia

The Silver Chair (1953), Ch. 16: The Healing of Harms
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956)

“Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? When I see the temporal suffering of humans who finally escape us, I feel as if I had been allowed to taste the first course of a rich banquet and then denied all the rest. It is worse than not to have tasted it at all. The Enemy, true to His barbarous methods of warfare, allows us to see the short misery of His favourites only to tantalize and torment us — to mock the incessant hunger, which, during this present phase of great conflict, His blockade is admittedly imposing.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter V
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

“I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.”

Clive Staples Lewis

"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) — in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 24

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”

Clive Staples Lewis

"Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare", Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)

“As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.”

Clive Staples Lewis

The Weight of Glory (1949)

“I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book I, Chapter 5, "We Have Cause to Be Uneasy"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.”

Clive Staples Lewis

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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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

“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)

“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)