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Age
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As for wrinkles--Pshaw! Why shouldn't we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.
-C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady 1967
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Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life. But of course, like autumn, it doesn't last.
-C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis 1966 27 October 1963
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Atheism
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In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere
-C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: Fount, 1977), pp. 153-4, 1955
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Authors & Writing
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We turn first ter the bleedin' parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare collocated by Guvnor Cruickshank ter make manifest Massinger's indebtedness. I'll get out me spoons. One of the surest of tests is the way in wich a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets nick; bad poets deface wot they take, and right good poets make it into sumfink better, or at least sumfink different. The bloody right good poet welds 'is theft into a 'oole of feelin' wich is unique, right, utterly different from that from wich it were torn; the bad poet frows it into sumfink wich 'as no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from auffors remote in time, or alien in 'am sandwich, right, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The bleedin' two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from 'im; 'e is too close ter ffem ter be of use ter ffem in this way. Massinger, as Guvnor Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a right good deal.
note: this is the original spelling as Lewis wrote it. Also: see a quote attributed to T.S. Eliot
-C.S. Lewis, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1922
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Belief
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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.
http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/
-C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry? The Weight of Glory and other Addresses (New York: Harper Collins publishers, 1980), p. 140
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Bible, The
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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. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.
-C.S. Lewis, Letters
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Books
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Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
-C.S. Lewis, Quoted in Paul Holmer, C S Lewis (1978)
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Character
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Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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Charity
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Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
-C.S. Lewis
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I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.
-C.S. Lewis
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Chastity
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Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they own their bodies -- those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
-C.S. Lewis
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Culture
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A faith in culture is as bad as a faith in religion; both expressions imply a turning away from those very things which culture and religion are about. Culture as a collective name for certain very valuable activities is a permissible word; but culture hypostatized, set up on its own, made into a faith, a cause, a banner, a platform, is unendurable. For none of the activities in question cares a straw for that faith or cause. It is like a return to early Semitic religion where names themselves were regarded as powers.
-C.S. Lewis, Lilies that Fester
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Death
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If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?
-C.S. Lewis
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It is hard to have patience with people who say There is no death or Death doesn't matter. There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
-C.S. Lewis
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Desires
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If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
-C.S. Lewis
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All joy emphasises our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
-C.S. Lewis, Letters
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Difficulty
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We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.
-C.S. Lewis
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Diplomacy
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The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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Education
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The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
-C.S. Lewis
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Evangelism
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The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.
-C.S. Lewis
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Evil
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I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
-C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, preface
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Experience
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What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.
-C.S. Lewis
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Fairy Tales
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Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adults themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.... When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
-C.S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children, from On Stories
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Faith
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Faith... is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.
-C.S. Lewis
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Fools, Foolishness
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You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better -- the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read.
-C.S. Lewis
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Friends
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Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
-C.S. Lewis
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God
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The thing is to rely on God. The time will come when you will regard all this misery as a small price to pay for having been brought to that dependence. Meanwhile, the trouble is that relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing has yet been done.
-C.S. Lewis
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Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
-C.S. Lewis
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We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always easy to penetrate. The real labor is to remember to attend. In fact to come awake. Still more to remain awake.
-C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm
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Grief, Grieving
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No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
-C.S. Lewis
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If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
-C.S. Lewis
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Happiness
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God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
-C.S. Lewis
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Heart
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To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
-C.S. Lewis
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Heaven
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“If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.â€
-C.S. Lewis
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If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
-C.S. Lewis
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Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
-C.S. Lewis
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Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth, and you will get neither.
-C.S. Lewis
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Hell
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The safest road to hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
-C.S. Lewis
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Humanity
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Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
-C.S. Lewis
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Instinct
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Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest....
-C.S. Lewis, attributed
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Joy, Excitement
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I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
-C.S. Lewis
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Love
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Heaven offers nothing that the mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.
-C.S. Lewis
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When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.
-C.S. Lewis
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Marriage
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There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
-C.S. Lewis
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Mercy
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In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them. There is here a cruel dilemma before us. If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing directly into the Enemy's hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behaviour, this sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor.This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy's motives for creating a dangerous world-a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yieldsto danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
(the enemy referred to is God)
-C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
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Miracles
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It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
-C.S. Lewis
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Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
-C.S. Lewis
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Money
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Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
-C.S. Lewis
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Morals
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People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, 'If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing.' I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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Nothing
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And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
-C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
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Pain
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The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
-C.S. Lewis
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We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities, and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
-C.S. Lewis
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Prayer
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They tell me, Lord, that when I seem
To be in speech with you.
Since but one voice is heard, it
-C.S. Lewis
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Pride
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A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you can't see something that's above you.
-C.S. Lewis
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There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.
The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. Chapter 8 in Book III: Christian Behaviour
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Religion
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Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
-C.S. Lewis
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Risk
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Make the choice adventurous stranger, strike the bell and bide the danger or wonder 'till it drives you mad what would have happened if you had.
-C.S. Lewis
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Self-love
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You are told to love your neighbour as yourself. How do you love yourself? When I look into my own mind, I find that I do not love myself by thinking myself a dear old chap or having affectionate feelings. I do not think that I love myself because I am particularly good, but just because I am myself and quite apart from my character. I might detest something which I have done. Nevertheless, I do not cease to love myself. In other words, that definite distinction that Christians make between hating sin and loving the sinner is one that you have been making in your own case since you were born. You dislike what you have done, but you don't cease to love yourself. You may even think that you ought to be hanged. You may even think that you ought to go to the Police and own up and be hanged. Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
-C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock by C. S. Lewis, Walter Hooper
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Surrender
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There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way'.
-C.S. Lewis
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Time
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All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
-C.S. Lewis
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Truth
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The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event.
-C.S. Lewis
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-C.S. Lewis
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Tyranny
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Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-C.S. Lewis
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Value
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The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.
-C.S. Lewis
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Words
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But perhaps the most mysterious thing he ever said about it was this. I was questioning him on the subject
-C.S. Lewis
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Books by and about C.S. Lewis
