Clive Staples Lewis: Thing

“The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book I, Chapter 2, "Some Objections"
Mere Christianity (1952)
Context: The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

Nature

“When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest eldil, is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!”

Clive Staples Lewis book Perelandra

Perelandra (1943)

Men , World

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Psyche
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)
Context: The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

Life , Beauty , Mountain , Country

“I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Source: Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, p. 89
Context: But why,' (some ask), 'why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?' Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by 'character delineation' is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?

Life , Men

“Time is the very lens through which ye see — small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope — something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 13
Context: "Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it's ill talking of such questions."
"Because they are too terrible, Sir?"
"No. Because all answers deceive. If ye put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it. But if ye are trying to leap on into Eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. Time is the very lens through which ye see — small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope — something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn't is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it's truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic's vision) that claims to go behind it. For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom."

Men , Reality , Freedom , Time

“I think that all things, in their own way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)
Context: I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their own way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. "Reflect" is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image.

Truth , Way , Imagination , Thinking

“God is not an impersonal thing nor a static thing—not even just one person—but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance … (The) pattern of this three-personal life is … the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"
Mere Christianity (1952)
Context: They [Christians] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else. And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not an impersonal thing nor a static thing—not even just one person—but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance … (The) pattern of this three-personal life is … the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.

Life , God , Beauty , Thinking

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

Clive Staples Lewis

"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) — in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
Context: Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Fear

“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.”

Clive Staples Lewis

"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) — in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
Context: Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Childhood

“I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"Miracles" (1942), p. 25
God in the Dock (1970)

Life , Soul , Thinking , Personality

“The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 5, "Sexual Morality"
Mere Christianity (1952)

People , Pleasure , Hell , Sport

“You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book IV, Chapter 2, "The Three-personal God"
Mere Christianity (1952)

God , Religion , Way , Science

“Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Not found in Lewis's works.
"Integrity means doing the right thing at all times, without hesitation" is found in a 1943 syndicated newspaper column. Elsie Robinson, "Listen, World!" https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/58360960/, Evening News (Harrisburg, PA), 1943-02-24, p. 10.
"Integrity means doing the right thing even when no one is there to judge" is found (unattributed) in the 1965 Journal of Clinical Psychology https://books.google.com/books?id=9rm1AAAAIAAJ&dq=%22integrity%22+%22doing+the+right+thing%22&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22doing+the+right+thing%22.
The quote became attributed to C.S. Lewis by 2012 https://books.google.com/books?id=XH-1TURLaf4C&pg=PT154&dq=integrity+%22even+when%22+%22c+s+lewis%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi6x9XznoTKAhUKymMKHdoKCKoQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=integrity%20%22even%20when%22%20%22c%20s%20lewis%22&f=false.
Misattributed

Deep , Powerful

“Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. It does involve the belief that God loves man and for his sake became man and died.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Miracles

Source: Miracles (1947), Ch. 7: "A Chapter of Red Herrings"

Love , God

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 4, "Morality and Psychoanalysis"
Mere Christianity (1952)

Life , God , War , Peace

“It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 6, "Christian Marriage"
Mere Christianity (1952)