C.S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.
Lewis was married to poet Joy Davidman.
W.H. Lewis was his elder brother]
“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...”
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
“It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.”
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even 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. To love is to be vulnerable.”
“The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)...”
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
“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.”
“The decay of Logic results from an untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.”
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
“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.”
“I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
“If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.”
“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.”
“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”