Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) was a British writer and lay theologian. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. Lewis was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He is best known for his works of fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.
Friendship… is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…”Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.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.
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.
C. S. Lewis
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.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.A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up tower, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
C. S. Lewis
I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.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.No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally—and often far more—worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
C. S. Lewis
Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.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...I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.A woman’s heart should be so close to God that a man should have to chase Him to find her.Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.When Christ died, he died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only person in the world.
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.
C. S. Lewis
You can make anything by writing.The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
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.
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
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.Courage, dear heart.The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
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
It isn't Narnia, you know," sobbed Lucy. "It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?" "But you shall meet me, dear one," said Aslan. "Are -are you there too, Sir?" said Edmund. "I am," said Aslan. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.
C. S. Lewis
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.
C. S. Lewis
Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult 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. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. 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
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.We are what we believe we are.If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you do, and you will presently come to love him.I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.We meet no ordinary people in our lives.Don’t shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you others can see Him.She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.Things never happen the same way twice.I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.
To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.
C. S. Lewis
And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
C. S. Lewis
And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
C. S. Lewis
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
