Clive Staples Lewis Quotes

The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under.

Friendship is...the sort of love one can imagine between angels.....

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.

La tarea del educador moderno no es podar las selvas, sino regar los desiertos.

He could never empty, or silence, his own mind to make room for an alien thought.

Do not by any means destroy yourself. For if you live, you may yet have good fortune but all the dead are dead alike.

Surprised by joy—impatient as the wind WORDSWORTH

in 1916 that an infantry subaltern would be insane to waste anxiety on anything so hypothetical as his postwar life.

Any saying is to be taken in the sense it would naturally have borne in the time and place of utterance.

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

I had come out of the station on the wrong side and been all this time walking into what was even then the mean and sprawling suburb of Botley. I did not see to what extent this little adventure was an allegory of my whole life.

I wonder if people who asked for God to intervene in our world, really know what they are asking. Will they want to be there when God really does intervene? – (Clive Staples) C. S. Lewis

The truth is, I think, that while death (mine, his, everyone’s) was often vividly present to him as a subject of anxiety and other emotions, it had no place in his mind as a sober, matter-of-fact contingency from which consequences could be drawn. At any rate the conversation was a failure.

Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle. (...) There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.

I notice that a man seldom mentions what he had supposed to be his most idiosyncratic sensations without receiving from at least one (often more) of those present the reply, “What! Have you felt that too? I always thought I was the only one.” The book aims at telling the story of my conversion and is not a general autobiography, still less “Confessions” like those of St. Augustine or Rousseau. This means in practice that it gets less like a general autobiography as it goes on.

It was very cold and next day snow began to fall, turning pinnacles into wedding-cake decorations. The examination was held in the Hall of Oriel, and we all wrote in greatcoats and mufflers and wearing at least our left-hand gloves. The Provost, old Phelps, gave out the papers. I remember very little about them, but I suppose I was outshone in pure classics by many of my rivals and succeeded on my general knowledge and dialectics. I had the impression that I was doing badly.

<>. <>. <>. <>. <>. <> <>. <> <>.

When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude, however unlikely the conclusion seems, that you have a taste for middle-aged moralising.

It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.

I think that real landscapes enter into pictures, not that pictures will one day sprout out into real trees and grass

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

He called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime.

Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

La compagnie, de tant d’hommes vous plaist, nobles, jeunes, actifs; la liberté de cette conversation sans art, et une façon de vie masle et sans cérémonie. MONTAIGNE

Reid y no temáis, criaturas. Ahora que ya no sois mudas ni necias, no tenéis por qué mostraros siempre solemnes. Pues los chistes, igual que la justicia, van unidos al habla.

Though the world is slow to forgive, it is quick to forget.

Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

On this view, the world of facts, without one trace of value, and the world of feeUngs, without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible.

On this view, the world of facts, without one trace of value, and the world of feelings, without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible.

Every man, I believe, enjoys the world picture which he accepts, for the gravity and finality of the actual is itself an aesthetic stimulus. In thissense, Christianity, Life-Force-Worship, Marxism, Freudianism all become :poetries" to their own believers. But this does not mean that their adherents have chosen them for that reason. On the contrary, this kind of poetry is the result, not the cause, of belief. Theology is, in this sense, poetry to me because I believe it; I do not believe it because it is poetry.

All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question “If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?

The contemplation of what we take to be real is always, I think, in tolerably sensitive minds, attended with a certain sort of aesthetic satisfaction--a sort which depends precisely on its supposed reality. There is a dignity and poignancy in the bare fact that a thing exists.

It is not an accidental resemblance that what, from the point of view of being, is stated in the form "God became Man," should involve, from the point of view of human knowledge, the statement "Myth became Fact." The essential meaning of all things came down from the "heaven" of myth to the "earth" of history.

He replied at once with fatherly counsels about the necessity of hard work and concentration, the amount that he had already spent in educating me, the very moderate, nay negligible, assistance he would be able to give me in later life. Poor man! He misjudged me sadly if he thought that idleness at my book was among my many vices.

I knew very well by now that there was hardly any position in the world save that of a don in which I was fitted to earn a living, and that I was staking everything on a game in which few won and hundreds lost. As Kirk had said of me in a letter to my father (I did 174 not, of course, see it till many years later), “You may make a writer or a scholar of him, but you’ll not make anything else.

Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like penciled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which because invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.

Since then, we have begun to see why our Oppressor was so secretive. His throne depends on the secret. Members of His faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came to understand what He means by Love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven. And there lies the great task. We know that He cannot really love: nobody can: it doesn't make sense. If we could only find out what He is really up to!

I'm not saying these things in blame of you, dear Prince," answered the Doctor. "You may well ask why I say them at all. But I have two reasons. Firstly, because my old heart has carried these secret memories so long that it aches with them and would burst if I did not whisper them to you. But secondly, for this: that when you become King you may help us, for I know that you also, Telmarine though you are, love the Old Things.

You can say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true. If any of them do not appeal to you, leave it alone and get on with the formula that does. And, whatever you do, do not start quarreling with other people because they use a different formula from yours.

But we need not surrender the love of nature--chastened and limited as I have suggested--to the debunkers. Nature cannot satisfy the desires she arouses nor answer theological questions nor sanctify us. Our real journey to God involves constantly turning our backs on her; passing from the dawn-lit fields into some poky little church, or (it might be) going to work in an East End parish. But the love of her has been a valuable and, for some people, an indispensable initiation.

About a week after this it was quite certain that Digory's Mother was getting better. About a fortnight later she was able to sit out in the garden. And a month later that whole house had become a different place. Aunt Letty did everything that Mother liked; windows were opened, frowsy curtains were drawn back to brighten up the rooms, there were new flowers everywhere, and nicer things to eat, and the old piano was tuned and Mother took up her singing again, and had such games with Digory and Polly that Aunt Letty would say "I declare, Mabel, you're the biggest baby of the three.

For I take it there are two things the imagination loves to do. It loves to embrace its objects completely, to take it in at a single glace, and see it as something harmonious, symmetrical, and self-explanatory. That is the classical imagination; the Parthenon was built for it. It also loves to lose itself in a labyrinth, to surrender to the inextricable. That is the romantic imagination; the Orlando Furioso was written for it. But Christian Theology does not cater very well for either. If Christianity is only a mythology, then I find the mythology I believe in is not the one I like best. I like Greek mythology much better, Irish better still, Norse best of all.

Teach him to call it ‘real-life and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’. (...) Never having been human (...) you don’t realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. (...) Thanks to processes we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. (...) But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is ‘the results of modern investigation’. Do remember you are there to fuddle him.

Pictures are part of the visible world themselves and represent it only by being part of it. Their visibility has the same source. The suns and lamps in pictures seem to shine only because real suns or lamps shine on them; that is, they seem to shine a great deal because they really shine a little in reflecting their archetypes. The sunlight in a picture is therefore not related to real sunlight simply as written words are to spoken. It is a sign, but also something more than a sign, and only a sign because it is also more than a sign because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name the relation I should call it not symbolical but sacramental.

And the sceptic’s conclusion that the so-called spiritual is really derived from the natural, that it is a mirage or projection or imaginary extension of the natural, is also exactly as we should expect; for, as we have seen, this is the mistake which an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make in any case of Transposition. The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find anything but flat shapes in a picture; physiology never can find anything in thought except twichings of the grey matter. It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition form below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible. Everything is different when you approach a Transposition from above.

O espírito desse esquema, ainda que não em todos os detalhes, está bem presente no Modelo Medieval. E se o leitor suspender sua descrença e exercitar sua imaginação neste assunto, mesmo que só por alguns minutos, acho que tomará consciência do amplo reajuste envolvido na leitura atenta dos poetas antigos. Encontrará toda a sua atitude perante o Universo invertida. No pensamento moderno, isto é, no pensamento evolucionário, o homem está no topo de uma escada cuja base se perde na escuridão; nesse Modelo, ele está na base de uma escada cujo topo é invisível por causa da luz ofuscante. Também compreenderá que algo, além do gênio individual, ajudou a dar aos anjos de Dante aquela majestade inigualável. Milton, ao perseguir esse objetivo, errou o alvo. O classicismo entrou no meio. Seus anjos têm anatomia demais, armaduras demais, e são por demais parecidos com os deuses de Homero e Virgílio, e (por essa mesma razão) são muito pouco parecidos com os deuses do paganismo em seus desenvolvimentos religiosos mais elevados. Depois de Milton, instaurou-se a degradação completa e, por fim, chegamos aos anjos puramente consoladores - portanto, femininos e aguados - da arte do século XIX.

C'è chi ha ritenuto che tutti questi amori fossero copie del nostro amore per il Signore". "Ma certamente l'avranno considerato e respinto. Le loro scienza l'hanno confutato". "Non hanno potuto farlo perché le loro scienze non sono per nulla interessate nelle relazioni generali di questo paese per alcuna cosa che possa trovarsi a oriente o a occidente di esso. Ti diranno sicuramente che le loro ricerche hanno provato che se due cose sono similari, quella bella è sempre la copia di quella brutta. Ma l'unica loro ragione nel fare questa affermazione è che hanno già deciso che la cosa più bella di tutte-cioè a dire il Signore e, se vuoi, le montagne e l'Isola-non sono altro che una copia di questo paese. Hanno la presunzione che le loro ricerche cunducano a quella dottrina; ma in effetti, danno per scontata prima di tutto quella dottrina ed interpretano le loro ricerche a partire da essa". "Ma hanno delle buone ragioni per ritenerlo". "Non ne hanno nessuna, perché hanno smesso di dare ascolto alle sole persone che possono dire alcunché sull'argomento". "Chi sono queste persone?" "Sono due mie sorelle, più giovani di me, e i loro nomi sono Filosofia e Teologia". "Sorelle! E chi è vostro padre?" "Lo saprai più presto di quel che credi".

I was born in the winter of 1898 at Belfast, the son of a solicitor and of a clergyman’s daughter.”[4] On 29 November 1898, Clive Staples Lewis was plunged into a world that was simmering with political and social resentment and clamouring for change. The partition of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was still two decades away. Yet the tensions that would lead to this artificial political division of the island were obvious to all. Lewis was born into the heart of the Protestant establishment of Ireland (the “Ascendancy”) at a time when every one of its aspects—political, social, religious, and cultural—was under threat.

You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.

It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilised taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to Top People.

I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful a midnight, to receive you.

The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is quite the different question—how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christian and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the church with rules enforced by her on her own members.

um desejo insatisfeito que é em si mesmo mais desejável do que qualquer outra satisfação. Chamo isso de alegria.

Forgiveness does not mean excusing.   - Clive Staples Lewis

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other. A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it . . . We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about 'parallels' and 'Pagan Christs': they ought to be there - it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not in false spirituality withhold our imaginative welcome.

Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.

We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees.

And the kind of equality which implies that the equals are interchangeable (like counters or identical machines) is, among humans, a legal fiction. It may be a useful legal fiction. But in church we turn our back on fictions. One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church. We have no authority to take the living and semitive figures which God has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures.

We are what we believe we are.

The earliest Christians were not so much like a [person] who mistakes the shell for the kernel as like a [person] carrying a nut which [they have not] yet cracked. The moment it is cracked, [they know] which part to throw away. Till then [they hold] on to the nut, not because [they are a] fool but because [they are not].

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963), popularly known as C. S. Lewis, was an academic, novelist, poet, medievalist, literary critic, theologian, and Christian apologist.

There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. -- Brave words, from a man named Clive Staples Lewis.

Solo conocéis un alma en toda la creación; y esa es la única cuyo destino está en vuestras manos

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed that is one of the reasons I believe Christianity it is a religion you could not have guessed.

If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is silly, then to complain that the something more is not simple very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy Christianity.

If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.