C. S. Lewis citations (273 citations, Page 7)

C. S. Lewis: 273 citations 0 J'aime

C. S. Lewis Citations

“Je suis un païen converti vivant au milieu de puritains apostats.”

C. S. Lewis

en
Surpris par la joie (Surprised by Joy, 1955)

C. S. Lewis: Citations en anglais

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

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).

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis livre The Screwtape Letters

Preface
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis livre The Pilgrim's Regress

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

“Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis livre Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 8, "The Great Sin"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis

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

“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.””

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis

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

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

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis

The Weight of Glory (1949)

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

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis livre The Pilgrim's Regress

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

“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.””

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis livre The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 168
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.”

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis livre The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 19–20
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.”

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis livre 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…”

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis livre 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?”

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis livre The Pilgrim's Regress

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Clive Staples Lewis

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

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

Help us translate this quote

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