Quotes from book
Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy
Clive Staples Lewis

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life is a partial autobiography published by C. S. Lewis in 1955. Specifically, the book describes the author's conversion to Christianity which had taken place 24 years earlier.

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“Who are you? Nobody. Who is Porridge? THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson: 'Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere… God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Source: Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 191

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“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)

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“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)

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“… 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)

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“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.

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