Quotes by C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis

Irish novelist and poet

Lived from: 1898 - 1963

Category: Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagUnited Kingdom

Born: 29 november 1898 Died: 22 november 1963

Quotes 21 till 40 of 134.

  • Be not deceived, Wormwood, our cause is never more in jeopardy than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe in which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
    Source: The Screwtape Letters (1942)
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  • But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are on concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
    Source: The Worlds Last Night (1952)
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  • But supposing one tries to live by Pantheistic philosophy? Does it lead to a complacent Hegelian optimism?
    Source: The Pilgrims Regress (1933) Pilgrims Regress 132-133
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  • But then again of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all.
    Source: A Grief Observed (1961)
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  • Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
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  • Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness.
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  • 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.
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  • Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.
    Source: The Screwtape Letters (1942)
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  • 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.
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  • Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
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  • Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.
    Source: Surprised by Joy (1955)
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  • 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.
    Source: A Year with C. S. Lewis
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  • Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
    Source: A preface to Paradise Lost
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  • Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.
    Source: The Great Divorce (1944)
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  • Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
    Source: The Problem of Pain (1940)
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  • Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
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  • For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.
    Source: Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare, Rehabilitations (1939)
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  • Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that this present might be the world's last night; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.
    Source: The Worlds Last Night (1952)
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  • Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
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  • God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
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