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
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Eternity, Change, Time
Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth, and you will get neither.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Heaven, Aspirations, Goals
The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Knowledge
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
Topics: The Bible
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Thinking
Which of the religions of the world gives to its followers the greatest happiness? While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is best
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Religion
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
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Evil
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
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
—C. S. Lewis
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Pain
Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Pleasure
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Universe
God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain
—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
But perhaps the most mysterious thing he ever said about it was this. I was questioning him on the subject
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Words
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Feelings
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Education
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Truth, To Be Born Everyday, Creativity
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: Fools, Foolishness
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 quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It’s not the sort of comfort they supply there.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Prayer
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Honor
Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Philosophy
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 yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Mercy
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
Topics: Risk
God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
—C. S. Lewis
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Friends, Friendship, Survival
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Values
I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God- it changes me.
—C. S. Lewis
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