Quotes from book
The Pilgrim's Regress

Name: The Pilgrim's Regress
Author: Clive Staples Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis

The Pilgrim's Regress is a book of allegorical fiction by C. S. Lewis.

“I hope, said the third, that your wanderings in lonely places do not mean that you have any of the romantic virus still in your blood. His name was Mr. Humanist.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

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

“Wisdom: The first error is that of the southern people, and it consists in holding that these eastern and western places are real places. … give no quarter to that thought, whether it threatens you with fear, or tempts you with hopes. For this is Superstition and all who believe it will come in the end to the swamps to the south and the jungles to the far south. Part of the same error is to think that the Landlord is a real man:”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 117
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“Try now to answer my third riddle. By what rule to you tell a copy from an original?”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 52
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“I am sorry that my convictions do not allow me to repeat my friend’s offer, said one of the others. But I have had to abandon the humanitarian and egalitarian fancies. His name was Mr. Neo-Classical.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 89
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“John – I’m trying to find the Island in the West. Sensible – You refer, no doubt to some aesthetic experience.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 77
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“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. (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 186–187
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“The Spirit of the Age wishes to allow argument and not to allow argument. … If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue themselves to show that their own doctrines are true. … You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 63
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“Then he tried to recall the lessons of Mr. Wisdom. “it is I myself, eternal Spirit, who drives this Me, the slave, along that ledge. I ought not to care whether he falls and breaks his neck or not. It is not he that is real, it is I – I – I.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 137
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“Our father was married twice,' continued Humanist. 'Once to a lady named Epichaerecacia, and afterwards to Euphuia…”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

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

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

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 22
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis book 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.””

Clive Staples Lewis book 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.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 19–20
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“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?”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

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

“Mr. Sensible learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 176
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

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

“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)

“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 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)

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