Christian author (1898-1963)
Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.
C. S. LEWIS
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
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
And now, haste, haste, haste.
C. S. LEWIS
Prince Caspian, the Return to Narnia
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.
C. S. LEWIS
Out of the Silent Planet
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
The man is a humbug -- a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him.
C. S. LEWIS
diary entry regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay, July 1924
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
All names will soon be restored to their proper owners.
C. S. LEWIS
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
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
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
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
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.
C. S. LEWIS
letter, April 29, 1959
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
Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.
C. S. LEWIS
Of This and Other Worlds
This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!
C. S. LEWIS
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
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
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
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