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C. S. Lewis

274 quotes

• “I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1905 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Arthur Greeves (7 March 1916); in Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Family Letters, 1905–1931 (2004), p. 170

• “But the man [Macaulay] is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Part of a diary (dated 9–16 July 1924); in Walter Hooper, ed., All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922–1927 (1991), p. 344

• “I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Arthur Greeves (February 1932); in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 1914–1963 (1979), p. 439

• “Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Arthur Greeves (29 December 1935); in They Stand Together (1979), p. 477

• “For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare", in Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)

• “On recent and contemporary literature their [students'] need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor's assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse's assistance in blowing his own nose.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Our English Syllabus", in Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939). Reprinted in Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews by C. S. Lewis (Cambridge UP, 2013)

• “Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), Chapter 2: "Is Criticism Possible?

• “A man, an adult, is precisely what he [Aeneas] is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), Chapter 6: "Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic

• “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Myth Became Fact" (1944)

• “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Is Theology Poetry?" (1945)

• “Do not blame us too much if we that are hedgerow folk Cannot swell the rejoicings at this new world you make — We, hedge-hoggèd as Johnson or Borrow, strange to the yoke As Landor, surly as Cobbett (that badger), birdlike as Blake.A new scent troubles the air — to you, friendly perhaps — But we with animal wisdom have understood that smell. To all our kind its message is Guns, Ferrets, and Traps, And a Ministry gassing the little holes in which we dwell.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Condemned", sts. 2 and 3; in The Spectator (7 September 1945), p. 219; revised and retitled "Under Sentence" in Poems (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), p. 63

• “I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950), quoted in Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (2001), p. 393

• “As to Macarthur, I don't feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they're always a mass of lies & misunderstandings: so I conclude they're no better in the places where I don't know.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Mrs. Mary Van Deusen (30 April 1951); in Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 3: "Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950-1963", p. 114

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

• “It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter (8 November 1952); in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 247

• “I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952); in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 24

• “He [the child] does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952)

• “I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter (17 July 1953); Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 251

• “Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Foreword to Joy Davidman's Smoke on the Mountain (1954)

• “For the Supernatural, entering a human soul, opens to it new possibilities both of good and evil. From that point the road branches: one way to sanctity, love, humility, the other to spiritual pride, self-righteousness, persecuting zeal. And no way back to the mere humdrum virtues and vices of the unawakened soul. If the Divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Reflections on the Psalms (1958), p. 32

• “Where we find a difficulty we may always expect that a discovery awaits us. Where there is cover we hope for game.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Reflections on the Psalms (1958), ch. III: Cursings

• “The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Reflections on the Psalms (1958), ch. VII: Connivance, p. 73

• “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.'”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Lucy (11 September 1958); in C. S. Lewis' Letters to Children (1988)

• “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter (29 April 1959); Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 285

• “Everything" is a subject on which there is not much to be said.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Studies in Words (1960), ch. 2

• “There are some things about your own village that you never know until you have been away from it.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Studies in Words (1960), ch. 11

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

• “The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered. For all its vast spaces it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered by-ways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Discarded Image (1964)

• “Jove laughed to see The abyss empeopled, his bliss imparted, the throng that was his and no longer he.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Le Roi S'Amuse", st. 6; in Poems (1964), p. 24

• “Looking for God — or Heaven — by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Seeing Eye", in Christian Reflections (1967), p. 167

• “[M]y friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966), "On Science Fiction

  Also quoted by: J. R. R. Tolkien

• “Leavis demands moral earnestness; I prefer morality. . . . I'd sooner live among people who don’t cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Unreal Estates", Conversation with Brian Aldiss and Kingsley Amis — in Spectrum IV (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 21

• “The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Last interview, by Sherwood Eliot Wirt (7 May 1963)

• “The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Funeral of a Great Myth", in Walter Hooper, ed., Christian Reflections (1967)

• “If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On Living in an Atomic Age", in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays by C. S. Lewis (London: Fount Paperbooks, 1986)

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth-century Rationalism Which can explain away religion by any number of methods.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.’”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “‘But you must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.’ ‘What would the third be?’ ‘Some have thought that all these loves were copies of our love for the Landlord.’”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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:”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “But supposing one tries to live by Pantheistic philosophy? Does it lead to a complacent Hegelian optimism?”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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