Christian author (1898-1963)
People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
C. S. LEWIS
letter to Sir Henry Willink, December 3, 1959
God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.
C. S. LEWIS
"Myth Became Fact"
God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.
C. S. LEWIS
The Great Divorce
The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There's not one of them which won't make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
Once the feet are put right, all the rest of him will follow.
C. S. LEWIS
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
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.
C. S. LEWIS
Joyful Christian
I mean, the more a man was in the Devil's power, the less he would be aware of it, on the principle that a man is still fairly sober as long as he knows he's drunk.
C. S. LEWIS
God in the Dock
We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C. S. LEWIS
The Abolition of Man
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
C. S. LEWIS
dedication, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all".
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
To think that the spectre you see is an illusion does not rob him of his terrors: it simply adds the further terror of madness itself -- and then on top of that the horrible surmise that those whom the rest call mad have, all along, been the only people who see the world as it really is.
C. S. LEWIS
Perelandra
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 towers, 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
Mere Christianity
Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case.
C. S. LEWIS
The Abolition of Man
This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again.... God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
C. S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters