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
You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Books
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
I believe in Christianity as I believe in the rising sun; not because I see it, but by it I can see all else.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Belief, Christians, Religion, Christianity
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
—C. S. Lewis
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.”
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Friendship
Don’t say it was “delightful” make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please will you do the job for me.”
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Writing
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Miracles
The rule for us all is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Friendship
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
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
Topics: Heaven
Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Growth
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
As for wrinkles—Pshaw! Why shouldn’t we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Age
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
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Grieving, Grief
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
Topics: Heaven
The great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, God’s love for us does not.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: God
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
Topics: Pride
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, Grieving, Bereavement
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
You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Philosophy
Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Belief, Faith
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Explanation, One liners
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, “Blessed are they that morn.”
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Difficulties, Difficulty
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
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Marriage
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 value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.
—C. S. Lewis
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
Topics: Love
I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in.
—C. S. Lewis
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
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Pain
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
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: Creativity, To Be Born Everyday, Truth
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
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
All joy emphasises our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Desires
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
Topics: Books, Literature, Reality
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
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Religion, Questions, God
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