Cs Lewis Quotes

Lewis was an apologist from temper, from conviction, and from modesty. From temper, for he loved argument. From conviction, being traditionally orthodox. From modesty, because he laid no claim either to the learning which would have made him a theologian or to the grace which would have made him a spiritual guide. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: "Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him." And they cried out in a great voice: "He made us." CS Lewis ~ Philip Zaleski

As he claimed the right to enjoy the literature of any period for the joy that was in it, so he claimed the liberty to profit from the insights of every generation open to his study. He would have been ashamed to know nothing of what was being said, written or done in his own day; but he felt under no obligation to find it better than the products of previous time, and especially than those which had passed the sieve of old oblivion. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life, he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except for a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals...Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weakness and shortcomings and nothing more. Anything beyond that he sharply suspected, both in himself and in others, as a symptom of spiritual megalomania. At best, there was so much else, in letters and in life, that he found much more interesting than himself. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Man, to Lewis, is an immortal subject; pains are his moral remedies, salutary disciplines, willing sacrifices, playing their part in a drama of interchange between God and him. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

All images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in a last resort, "It is not high. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?" CS Lewis ~ Philip Zaleski

Lewis lived in as good a setting as any man for the life of vigilant aestheticism...His rooms were on the first floor of New Buildings 3, and ran the width of the building, so that the sitting-room looked out on Magdalen Grove, the other half of the suite commanding the Cloister, and, in the background, the incomparable Tower. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

He had little sympathy...for Mirabel, and little for what I have called the New Sensibility of the early 'twenties, for its flat bleakness, its lawless versification, its unheroic tone, its unintelligible images, its 'modernity' in short. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

The marks of this style are weight and clarity of argument, sudden turns of generalization and genial paradox, the telling short sentence to sum a complex paragraph, and unexpected touches of personal approach to the reader, whom he always assumes to be as logical, as learned, as romantic, and as open to conviction as himself. Not that in fact he was easily open to conviction; perhaps 'open to argument' would be a truer description. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Like Johnson, Lewis was more impressive in his conversation than in his poetry, and more impressive in his prose - particularly in his learned prose - than in his conversation. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

When under suffering we see good men go to pieces we do not witness the failure of a moral discipline to take effect; we witness the advance of death where death comes by inches. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Grace will follow us even when we are going the wrong way ~ Ricky Maye

Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once. ~ C.S. Lewis

I feel compelled to make another 'nonapology.' Many readers are likely to be concerned about my use of masculine pronouns in relation to God. I think I both understand and appreciate this concern. It is a matter to which I have given much thought. I have generally been a strong supporter of the women's movement and action that is reasonable to combat sexist language. But first of all, God is not neuter. He is exploding with life and love and even sexuality of a sort. So 'It' is not appropriate. Certainly I consider God androgynous. He is as gentle and tender and nurturing and maternal as any woman could ever be. Nonetheless, culturally determined though it may be, I subjectively experience His reality as more masculine than feminine. While He nurtures us, He also desires to penetrate us, and while we more often than not flee from His love like a reluctant virgin, He chases after us with a vigor in the hunt that we most typically associate with males. As CS Lewis put it, in relation to God we are all female. Moreover, whatever our gender or conscious theology, it is our duty---our obligation---in response to His love to attempt to give birth, like Mary, to Christ in ourselves and in others.

"I shall, however, break with tradition and use the neuter for Satan. While I know Satan to be lustful to penetrate us, I have not in the least experienced this desire as sexual or creative---only hateful and destructive. It is hard to determine the sex of a snake. ~ M. Scott Peck

Muddled minds read him, and found themselves moving with delight in a world of clarity. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same...And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn't been doing very well lately. This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. If it gets too strong it may wake him up...if you suppress it entirely...we lose an element in the situation which can be turned to good account. If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. It increases the patient's reluctance to think about the Enemy. All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold...In this state your patient will not omit, but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties...He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with the Enemy. ~ C.S. Lewis

Is romantic yearning an appetite for [H]eaven, or is it the ultimate refinement of covetousness? ~ Jocelyn Gibb

I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.
I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.
The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they're not true ... I find that they're not true without looking further than myself. I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation ...
The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters. ~ C.S. Lewis

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. ~ C.S. Lewis

God's will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces the intrinsically good. But when we have said that God commands thing only because they are good, we must add that one of the things intrinsically good is that rational creatures should freely surrender themselves to their Creator in obedience. The content of our obedience - the thing we are commanded to do -- will always be something intrinsically good, something we ought to do even if (by an impossible supposition_ God had not commanded it. But in addition to the content, the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fill, treads Adam's dance backward, and returns. ~ C.S. Lewis

He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror. (on CS Lewis) ~ John Piper

The causes of this distribution I do not know; but from our present point of view it ought to be clear that the real problem is not why some humble pious believing people suffer, but why some do not. Our Lord Himself, it will be remembered, explained the salvation of those who are fortunate in this world only by referring to the unsearchable omnipotence of God. ~ C.S. Lewis

Christian theism, to those who believe it, commends itself as fact, not theory, by the sheer multiplicity of its bearings. Were it a speculation, it would surely face a single field of enquiry: it would assign the cause of the world, or the principle of duty, or the aim of existence, or the means of spiritual regeneration. If an equal light falls from a single source in all these directions at once, that source must seem to have the richness of a reality, rather than the abstract poverty of an idea. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche. ~ C.S. Lewis

life-giving generosity was another depth in Lewis's nature that was part of his greatness ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Lewis said sadly to me, 'When I at last realized that I was not, after all, going to be a great man...' I think he meant 'a great poet. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

The primary function of mental pain, says Lewis, is to force our misdirectedness on our attention. But just as it belongs to our fallen state to be blind to holiness until we suffer the consequences of sin, and blind to a higher good until natural satisfactions are snatched from us; so equally it belongs to our state that we cannot achieve disinterestedness until it costs us pain. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

There were many echoes of Johnson in Lewis. Both were formidable in their learning and in the range of their conversation, both had the same delight in argument, and in spite of their regard for truth, would argue for victory. Lewis had Johnson's handiness with the butt end of a pistol if an argument misfired. Like Johnson, he was a largish, unathletic-looking man, heavy but not tall, with a roundish, florid face that perspired easily and showed networks of tiny blood-vessels on close inspection; he had a dark flop of hair and rather heavily pouched eyes; these eyes gave life to the face, they were large and brown and unusually expressive. The main effects were of a mild, plain powerfulness, and over all there was a sense of simple masculinity, of a virility absorbed into intellectual life. He differed in his youth from most others of his age by seeming to have no sexual problems or preoccupations, or need to talk about them if he had them ~ Jocelyn Gibb

What will has caused, will must be brought to correct. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

he almost never spoke about himself, in my hearing at least: though once, shortly after his marriage, when he brought his wife to lunch with me, he said...looking at her across the grassy quadrangle, 'I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my twenties. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

a favourite couplet of Dunbar's sums up his view of the whole duty and delight of Man:

Man, please thy Maker and be merry
And give not for this world a cherry. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

He often expressed his amazement...at the power of theatre to transfigure a play, and inject it with significances he could never have imagined without it: yet for all that, he did not change custom or become a theatregoer, and this...was a part of the price he had to pay for a habit of Protestantism. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

You have never talked to a mere mortal. ~ C.S. Lewis

The gift of phrase was instantaneous to him in him, and that must partly account for his huge output; but there was a plentitude of mind as well as a swiftness of phrase to help him; he never put a nib wrong. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

In a letter, once, he drew me a picture, or allegorical diagram, imitated from the well-known frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan, which showed a Leviathan of human values. In the head there stood a figure labeled SAINT. In the heart, a figure labeled HERO. Twittering round the huge figure there was an insect-like object dressed as a man of fashion of the seventeenth century and labeled GENTLEMAN; from its mouth there issued a balloon in which was written in tiny letters: 'and where do I come in?'. Mirabel, he went on to say, was no part of the Everlasting Gospel, a phrase of Blake's that he had his own meaning for. Perhaps the hunger for magnitude that made him admire Gilgamesh and the Edda, and made Spenser and Milton his favourites, disabled him from an appreciation, which I could not deny, for a world of elegant cuckoldry and cynic wit, so seemingly heartless, a trifler's scum of humanity that sought to be taken for its cream. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

he gave an account of the Spenserian world that championed its ethical attitudes as well as their fairy-tale terms, with a rich joy in the defeat of dragons, giants, sorcerers, and sorceresses by the forces of virtue; it was a world he could inhabit and believe in as one inhabits and believes a dream of one's own; its knights, dwarfs, and ladies were real to him...he rejoiced as much in the ugliness of the giants and in the beauty of the ladies as in their spiritual significances, but most of all in the ambience of the faerie forest and plain that, he said, were carpeted with a grass greener than the common stuff of ordinary glades; this was the reality of grass, only to be apprehended in poetry: the world of the imagination was nearer to the truth than the world of the senses, notwithstanding its palpable fictions, and Spenser transcended sensuality by making use of it ~ Jocelyn Gibb

[Lewis had a] determined impersonality towards all except his very close friends. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

His sentences are in homely English, and yet there is something Roman in the easy handling of clauses, and something Greek in their ascent from analogy to idea. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

He was never quite at home in what we may call our post-positivist era ~ Jocelyn Gibb

CS Lewis may make difficult questions accessible. I don't think he makes answers 'easy. – Debra Winger ~ Greg Cootsona

There was...the discrepancy between what one expected of the accomplished medieval scholar (and, later, the penetrating exponent of theological and spiritual matters) and the robust, no-nonsense, unmistakably strident man, clumsy in movement and in dress, apparently little sensitive to the feelings of others, determined to cut his way to the heart of any matter with shouts of distinguo! before re-shaping it entirely. One quickly felt that for him dialectic supplied the place of conversation. Any general remarks were of an obvious and even platitudinous kind; talk was dead timber until the spark of argument flashed. Then in a trice you were whisked from particular to fundamental principles; thence (if you wanted) to eternal verities; and Lewis was alert for any riposte you could muster. It was comic as well as breathtaking; and Lewis would see the comedy as readily as the next man. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

It may be that the Chronicles of Narnia may outlive The Allegory of Love, and Perelandra outlive them both. Few works of learning and criticism survive a hundred years; what it was learned to know in 1950 will be expected of scholarship-candidates in 2000; new things will be discovered, old notions disproved, other critical values asserted; but a piece of genuine imagination in fiction may have a long life. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

It delighted him that he could find no use of the word modern in Shakespeare that did not carry its load of contempt. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

I believe Williams was the only one of us, except perhaps Ronald Tolkien, from whom Lewis learnt any of his thinking. It was Charles Williams who expounded to him the doctrine of co-inherence and the idea that one had power to accept into one's own body the pain of someone else, through Christian love. This was a power...he had been allowed to use to ease the suffering of his wife, a cancer victim ~ Jocelyn Gibb

His conversion to Christianity seems to have come about largely by thinking...It did not come by sudden intuition, or overwhelming vision, or even by the more usual path of conviction of sin calling for repentance and atonement. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

...to limit the meaning of Aslan simply to lion from Turkish is to miss its deep northern resonances and the song of the snowflakes whirling around it. Lewis admitted that, as a boy, he had been 'crazed by northern–ness' and there are many subtle references to Norse mythology in the story.
In fact, if we treat Aslan as a word from Old Norse, it simply means god of the land. By combining that meaning with Turkish lion, it is essentially cognate which Welsh, Llew, lion, the very word from which the name Lewis is derived. ~ Anne Hamilton

I sense in his style an indefeasible core of Protestant certainties, the certainties of a simple, unchanging, entrenched ethic that knows how to distinguish, unarguably, between Right and Wrong, Natural and Unnatural, High and Low, Black and White, with a committed force, an ethic on which his ramified and seemingly conciliatory structures of argument are invisibly based ~ Jocelyn Gibb

I asked him how he came to be writing for the popular American weekly. How did he know what to write about or what to say? 'Oh...they have somehow got the idea that I am an unaccountably paradoxical dog, and they name the subject on which they want me to write; and they pay generously.' 'And so you set to work and invent a few paradoxes?' Not a bit of it. What I do is to recall, as well as I can, what my mother used to say on the subject, eke it out with a few similar thoughts of my own, and so produce what would have been strict orthodoxy in about 1900. And this seems to them outrageously paradoxical, avant garde stuff. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

It is one thing to understand the doctrine, and quite another to be masters of the controversy.' Lewis's ambition was of course to know the doctrine and to be master of the controversy. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

I remember, on one occasion, as I went round Addison's Walk, I saw him coming slowly towards me, his round, rubicund face beaming with pleasure to itself. When we came within speaking distance, I said 'Hullo, Jack! You look very pleased with yourself; what is it?'
'I believe,' he answered, with a modest smile of triumph, 'I believe I have proved that the Renaissance never happened in England. Alternatively' - he held up his hand to prevent my astonished exclamation - 'that if it did, it had no importance! ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Show me a man with both feet on the ground and I'll show you a man who can't get his pants on. ~ Joe E. Lewis

People are still crying out for Lennox Lewis. They still want to see Lennox Lewis. That motivated me. I am still young. I have a couple fights left in me. ~ Lennox Lewis

If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all ~ C.S. Lewis

Nobody in college races home and says, 'I can't wait to see the news! I can't wait to see who CBS is going to hire!' ~ Lewis Black

You are old, Father William,' the young man said,
'And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head
Do you think, at your age, it is right?'
'In my youth,' Father William replied to his son,
'I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again. ~ Lewis Carroll

He had always disliked the people who encored a favorite air in an opera - "That just spoils it" had been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backward . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself - perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defense against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film. He ~ C.S. Lewis

I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie? ~ Sinclair Lewis

To generalize is to be an idiot, said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage. ~ C.S. Lewis

Doctors diagnose, nurses heal, and caregivers make sense of it all. ~ Brett H. Lewis

Be winged. Be the father of all flying horses," roared Aslan in a voice that shook the ground. "Your name is Fledge."
The horse shied, just as it might have shied in the old, miserable days when it pulled a hansom. Then it roared. It strained its neck back as if there were a fly biting its shoulders and it wanted to scratch them. And then, just as the beasts had burst out of the earth, there burst out from the shoulders of Fledge wings that spread and grew, larger than eagles', larger than swans', larger than angels' wings in church windows. The feathers shone chestnut color and copper color. He gave a great sweep with them and leapt into the air. Twenty feet above Aslan and Digory he snorted, neighed, and curvetted. Then, after circling once round them, he dropped to the earth, all four hoofs together, looking awkward and surprised, but extremely pleased.
"Is it good, Fledge?" said Aslan.
"It is very good, Aslan," said Fledge. ~ C.S. Lewis

Oh, there's no use talking to him. He's perfectly idiotic! ~ Lewis Carroll

think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense," C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. "It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable fron-tierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs. ~ Joan Didion

When pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all. ~ C.S. Lewis

Workers have kept faith in American institutions. Most of the conflicts, which have occurred have been when labor's right to live has been challenged and denied. ~ John L. Lewis

There are several insights at the heart of the A's system that I think are wonderful for baseball. One, that it's a team game. That no one player is going to make that much of a difference to your team, so for god's sake don't go blow a quarter of your budget on one guy. ~ Michael Lewis

What is his sorrow?" [ ... ] "It's all his fancy, that: he hasn't got no sorrow, you know. ~ Lewis Carroll

The first rule of book club - is that nobody wants to talk about book club. ~ Douglas Lewis

There's nothing like eating hay when you're faint,' he remarked to her, as he munched away.

'I should think throwing cold water over you would be better,' Alice suggested, '- or some sal-volatile.'

'I didn't say there was nothing BETTER,' the King replied. 'I said there was nothing LIKE it. ~ Lewis Carroll

In the strictest sense, anxiety is not a problem at all, but a sign that we are in touch with our intuitive powers. In previous chapters we saw how the discipline of any judgmental or deceptive ~ Lewis M. Andrews

You can't take no breaks. ~ Ray Lewis

Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not 'a religion', nor 'a philosophy.' It is the summing up and actuality of them all. ~ C.S. Lewis

These fingers of mine got brains in 'em. ~ Jerry Lee Lewis

Everything that is not eternal is worthless in eternity. ~ C.S. Lewis

It is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe. ~ C.S. Lewis

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death. ~ C.S. Lewis

In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people's we do not accept them easily enough. ~ C.S. Lewis

You too shall know, what it is to love without hope! ~ Matthew Gregory Lewis

The signatories quote various Muslim authorities and then proceed to the final and most important part of their declaration, the fatwa, laying down that to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Haram mosque [in Mecca] are freed from their grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim. ~ Bernard Lewis

We have to judge all evidence with the same amount of scrutiny. We want truth, not confirmation of whatever our preference is. ~ Lewis N. Roe

Freedom of religion is a principle that is central to our Nation's Declaration of Independence. Congress has taken this positive step to protect our freedom to express allegiance to America's flag and the ideals it represents. ~ Ron Lewis