Christian author (1898-1963)
I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.
C. S. LEWIS
Out of the Silent Planet
If you find that the reader of popular romances--however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances--goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.
C. S. LEWIS
"On Stories", Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
C. S. LEWIS
The Magician's Nephew
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
C. S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
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.... The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.
C. S. LEWIS
"On Stories", Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.
C. S. LEWIS
Fern-seeds and Elephants and Other Essays
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done."
C. S. LEWIS
The Great Divorce
All names will soon be restored to their proper owners.
C. S. LEWIS
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies -- those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
C. S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters
Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.
C. S. LEWIS
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
A perfect practice of Christianity would, of course, consist in a perfect imitation of the life of Christ -- I mean, in so far as it was applicable in one's own particular circumstance. Not in an idiotic sense -- it doesn't mean that every Christian should grow a beard, or be a bachelor, or become a travelling preacher. It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God.
C. S. LEWIS
God in the Dock
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.
C. S. LEWIS
"Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare", Rehabilitations
A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can't put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover.
C. S. LEWIS
Perelandra
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
C. S. LEWIS
preface, The Screwtape Letters
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
C. S. LEWIS
preface, The Screwtape Letters
This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!
C. S. LEWIS
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.
C. S. LEWIS
The Magician's Nephew
There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he "has read" them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?
C. S. LEWIS
"On Stories", Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories