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C. S. Lewis citations
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Clive Staples Lewis, plus connu sous le nom de C. S. Lewis, né à Belfast le 29 novembre 1898 et mort à Oxford le 22 novembre 1963, est un écrivain et universitaire britannique. Il est connu pour ses travaux sur la littérature médiévale, ses ouvrages de critique littéraire et d'apologétique du christianisme, ainsi que pour la série des Chroniques de Narnia parues entre 1950 et 1957.

Ami très proche de J. R. R. Tolkien, l'auteur du Seigneur des anneaux, il enseigne à ses côtés à la faculté de littérature anglaise de l'université d'Oxford ; ils faisaient tous deux partie du cercle littéraire des Inklings. Partiellement en raison de l'influence de Tolkien et de la lecture de G. K. Chesterton, Lewis s'est reconverti au christianisme, devenant, selon ses propres termes, « un très ordinaire laïc de l'Église d'Angleterre » ; cette reconversion a eu de profondes conséquences sur son œuvre. Il a acquis une grande popularité par les chroniques radiophoniques sur le christianisme qu'il a données au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et obtenu un énorme succès avec ses livres de fantasy pour enfants.

Les œuvres de C. S. Lewis ont été traduites en plus de 40 langues et le recueil des Chroniques de Narnia s'est vendu à plus de 120 millions d'exemplaires dans le monde et continue à se vendre au rythme de plus d'un million d'exemplaires par an. Le Monde de Narnia a également été adapté à plusieurs reprises au théâtre et au cinéma. Wikipedia  

✵ 29. novembre 1898 – 22. novembre 1963   •   Autres noms C.S. Lewis
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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

“A sensible human once said, "If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit"; and again, "She's the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression."”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre The Screwtape Letters

Letter XXVI
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

“The chief pleasure of his life in these days was to go down the road and look through the window in the wall in the hope of seeing the beautiful Island. … the sight of the Island and the sounds became very rare … and the yearning for the sight … became so terrible that John thought he would die if he did not have them again soon. … it came into his head that he might perhaps get the old feeling-for what, he thought, had the Island ever given him but a feeling?–by imagining. He shut his eyes and set his teeth again and made a picture of the Island in his mind.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 12–13
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis.”

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Clive Staples Lewis

"Haggard Rides Again", in Time and Tide, Vol. XLI (3 September 1960)

“The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”

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Clive Staples Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia

The Magician's Nephew (1955), Ch. 10: The First Joke and Other Matters
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956)

“"Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?"
"Hush," he said sternly. "Do not blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind — ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind — is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly."”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9

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

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

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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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

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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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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?”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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?"”

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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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

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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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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?”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

“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?”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.”

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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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre 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.'”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre That Hideous Strength

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

“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.”

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Clive Staples Lewis livre Mere Christianity

Preface
Mere Christianity (1952)

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