Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was a British academic, novelist, broadcaster, religious writer, literary scholar, and children’s writer.
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Lewis was the son of a solicitor. He was wounded in World War I, attended Oxford’s University College as a classicist, but made his career in English literature. Though a theological layman, Lewis became widely known as one of the most important Christian apologetics writers of the 20th century. His books The Problem of Pain (1940,) Miracles (1947,) and The Four Loves (1960) were highly influential. Lewis’s great reputation was largely due to his popular radio talks on religious themes, collected in Mere Christianity (1952.)
He held academic positions at both Oxford University and Cambridge University. He created the imaginary land of ‘Narnia’ for a series of seven fantasy stories, which began with the heavily allegorical and highly successful The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by C. S. Lewis
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
Topics: Wishes
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Evil
Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.
—C. S. Lewis
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
Topics: Age
You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, said Aslan. And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.
—C. S. Lewis
All joy emphasises our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Desires
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
Topics: Home
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
Topics: Grief, Bereavement, Grieving
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
Topics: Diplomacy
When we lose one blessing, another is often, most unexpectedly, given in its place.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Blessings
True friends … face in the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Goal, Friendship
Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Philosophy
We must lay before him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Prayer
We ought to give thanks for all fortune: it is good, because it is good, if bad, because it works in us patience, humility and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Fortune
Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Writing
Do not dare not to dare.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Adventure
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Tomorrow, Time Management, Time, Patience, Resilience, The Future, Future
The more often a man feels without acting, the less he’ll be able to act. And in the long run, the less he’ll be able to feel.
—C. S. Lewis
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
Topics: God
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Love, Affection
In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not. After that the idea that prayer is recommended to us as a sort of infallible gimmick may be dismissed.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Prayer
The safest road to hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Hell
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Grief, Grieving
We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: God
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
—C. S. Lewis
Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.
—C. S. Lewis
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
Topics: Tyranny
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Honor
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
Topics: Misery, Money
It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Religion
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Values
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Miracles
Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Experience
Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Prayer
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
Topics: Miracles
Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth, and you will get neither.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Aspirations, Goals, Heaven
When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.
—C. S. Lewis
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
Topics: Foolishness, Fools
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
Topics: Morals
A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is…. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Self-Control
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