Best 46 quotes in «cs lewis quotes» category

The marks of this style are weight and clarity of argument, sudden turns of generalization and genial paradox, the telling short sentence to sum a complex paragraph, and unexpected touches of personal approach to the reader, whom he always assumes to be as logical, as learned, as romantic, and as open to conviction as himself. Not that in fact he was easily open to conviction; perhaps 'open to argument' would be a truer description.

The gift of phrase was instantaneous to him in him, and that must partly account for his huge output; but there was a plentitude of mind as well as a swiftness of phrase to help him; he never put a nib wrong.

The primary function of mental pain, says Lewis, is to force our misdirectedness on our attention. But just as it belongs to our fallen state to be blind to holiness until we suffer the consequences of sin, and blind to a higher good until natural satisfactions are snatched from us; so equally it belongs to our state that we cannot achieve disinterestedness until it costs us pain.

There were many echoes of Johnson in Lewis. Both were formidable in their learning and in the range of their conversation, both had the same delight in argument, and in spite of their regard for truth, would argue for victory. Lewis had Johnson's handiness with the butt end of a pistol if an argument misfired. Like Johnson, he was a largish, unathletic-looking man, heavy but not tall, with a roundish, florid face that perspired easily and showed networks of tiny blood-vessels on close inspection; he had a dark flop of hair and rather heavily pouched eyes; these eyes gave life to the face, they were large and brown and unusually expressive. The main effects were of a mild, plain powerfulness, and over all there was a sense of simple masculinity, of a virility absorbed into intellectual life. He differed in his youth from most others of his age by seeming to have no sexual problems or preoccupations, or need to talk about them if he had them

The gift of phrase was instantaneous in him, and that must partly account for his huge output; but there was a plentitude of mind as well as a swiftness of phrase to help him; he never put a nib wrong.

There was...the discrepancy between what one expected of the accomplished medieval scholar (and, later, the penetrating exponent of theological and spiritual matters) and the robust, no-nonsense, unmistakably strident man, clumsy in movement and in dress, apparently little sensitive to the feelings of others, determined to cut his way to the heart of any matter with shouts of distinguo! before re-shaping it entirely. One quickly felt that for him dialectic supplied the place of conversation. Any general remarks were of an obvious and even platitudinous kind; talk was dead timber until the spark of argument flashed. Then in a trice you were whisked from particular to fundamental principles; thence (if you wanted) to eternal verities; and Lewis was alert for any riposte you could muster. It was comic as well as breathtaking; and Lewis would see the comedy as readily as the next man.

...to limit the meaning of Aslan simply to lion from Turkish is to miss its deep northern resonances and the song of the snowflakes whirling around it. Lewis admitted that, as a boy, he had been ‘crazed by northern–ness’ and there are many subtle references to Norse mythology in the story. In fact, if we treat Aslan as a word from Old Norse, it simply means god of the land. By combining that meaning with Turkish lion, it is essentially cognate which Welsh, Llew, lion, the very word from which the name Lewis is derived.

Thus, in The Lion they become monarchs under sovereign Jove; in Prince Caspian they harden under strong Mars; in The Dawn Treader they drink light under searching Sol; in The Silver Chair they learn obedience under subordinate Luna; in The Horse and His Boy they come to love poetry under eloquent Mercury; in the Magicians Nephew they gain life-giving fruit under fertile Venus; and in the Last Battle they suffer and die under chilling Saturn.

What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life, he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals...Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weakness and shortcomings and nothing more. Anything beyond that he sharply suspected, both in himself and in others, as a symptom of spiritual megalomania. At best, there was so much else, in letters and in life, that he found much more interesting than himself.

The whole man was in all his judgments and activities, and a discriminating zest for life, for 'common life', informs every page he wrote. He saw education as actualizing the potentiality for the leisured activities of thought, art, literature and conversation. 'Grete clerk' as he was, he was never willfully esoteric: quotations and allusions rose unbidden to the surface of his full and fertile mind, but whether drawn from Tristram Shandy or James Thurber they elucidate not decorate. His works are all of a piece: a book in one genre will correct, illumine, or amplify what is latent in another.

we would stride over Hinksey and Cumnor - we walked almost as fast as we talked - disputing and quoting, as we looked for the dark dingles and tree-topped hills of Matthew Arnold. This kind of walk must be among the commonest, perhaps among the best, of undergraduate experiences. Lewis, with the gusto of a Chesterton or a Belloc, would suddenly roar out a passage of poetry that he had newly discovered and memorized, particularly if it were in Old English, a language novel and enchanting to us both for its heroic attitudes and crashing rhythms

What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals...Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weakness and shortcomings and nothing more. Anything beyond that he sharply suspected, both in himself and in others, as a symptom of spiritual megalomania. At best, there was so much else, in letters and in life, that he found much more interesting! As far as I am able to judge, it was this that lay behind that distinctive combination of an almost supreme intellectual and 'phantastic' maturity, laced with moral energy, on the one hand, with...a certain psychic or spiritual immaturity on the other

What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life, he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except for a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals...Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weakness and shortcomings and nothing more. Anything beyond that he sharply suspected, both in himself and in others, as a symptom of spiritual megalomania. At best, there was so much else, in letters and in life, that he found much more interesting than himself.

What will has caused, will must be brought to correct.

When under suffering we see good men go to pieces we do not witness the failure of a moral discipline to take effect; we witness the advance of death where death comes by inches.

As he claimed the right to enjoy the literature of any period for the joy that was in it, so he claimed the liberty to profit from the insights of every generation open to his study. He would have been ashamed to know nothing of what was being said, written or done in his own day; but he felt under no obligation to find it better than the products of previous time, and especially than those which had passed the sieve of old oblivion.

Fine scholar though he was, he was an even better teacher; and it may truly be said of him...that in turning men's minds to the Middle Ages he 'stimulated their mental thirst...silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles'.

he almost never spoke about himself, in my hearing at least: though once, shortly after his marriage, when he brought his wife to lunch with me, he said...looking at her across the grassy quadrangle, 'I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my twenties.

he gave an account of the Spenserian world that championed its ethical attitudes as well as their fairy-tale terms, with a rich joy in the defeat of dragons, giants, sorcerers, and sorceresses by the forces of virtue; it was a world he could inhabit and believe in as one inhabits and believes a dream of one's own; its knights, dwarfs, and ladies were real to him...he rejoiced as much in the ugliness of the giants and in the beauty of the ladies as in their spiritual significances, but most of all in the ambience of the faerie forest and plain that, he said, were carpeted with a grass greener than the common stuff of ordinary glades; this was the reality of grass, only to be apprehended in poetry: the world of the imagination was nearer to the truth than the world of the senses, notwithstanding its palpable fictions, and Spenser transcended sensuality by making use of it

He had little sympathy...for Mirabel, and little for what I have called the New Sensibility of the early 'twenties, for its flat bleakness, its lawless versification, its unheroic tone, its unintelligible images, its 'modernity' in short.

Christian theism, to those who believe it, commends itself as fact, not theory, by the sheer multiplicity of its bearings. Were it a speculation, it would surely face a single field of enquiry: it would assign the cause of the world, or the principle of duty, or the aim of existence, or the means of spiritual regeneration. If an equal light falls from a single source in all these directions at once, that source must seem to have the richness of a reality, rather than the abstract poverty of an idea.

Grace will follow us even when we are going the wrong way

he remained enthralled by the sublimely ordered Ptolemaic cosmos in which 'we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, the army of unalterable law but rather the revelry of insatiable love.' He conceded that it was not 'true'; but in his last, perhaps his most provocative, pages, claimed that all 'models' of the universe reflect as much the psychology of an age as the current state of knowledge.

He was never quite at home in what we may call our post-positivist era

Here at last was an Attendant Spirit to liberate us from the spells of Burkhardt or Addington Symonds and challenge the easy antithesis of fantastic and fideistic Middle Ages versus logical and free-thinking Renaissance. And it is a prime justification of medieval studies that if properly pursued they soon dispose of such facile distinctions, and overthrow the barriers of narrow specialism and textbook chronology. In this sense medieval just as much as classical studies make men more humane. It would indeed be hard to separate in Lewis' culture the one from the other: just as hard as it is to understand the Middle Ages themselves without knowing classical literature or the Renaissance without knowing the Middle Ages. This continuity of literature and of learning Lewis not only asserted but embodied.

His tastes were essentially for what had magnitude and a suggestion of myth: the heroic and the romantic never failed to excite his imagination

His sentences are in homely English, and yet there is something Roman in the easy handling of clauses, and something Greek in their ascent from analogy to idea.

He often expressed his amazement...at the power of theatre to transfigure a play, and inject it with significances he could never have imagined without it: yet for all that, he did not change custom or become a theatregoer, and this...was a part of the price he had to pay for a habit of Protestantism.

His Christianity, so important to him personally, was also important professionally, for it enabled him to enter into fuller imaginative sympathy with the Middle Ages and Renaissance...and give spiritual substance to his life's work in those fields, so penetrated by Christian thought.

His conversion to Christianity seems to have come about largely by thinking...It did not come by sudden intuition, or overwhelming vision, or even by the more usual path of conviction of sin calling for repentance and atonement.

I'd felt certain of his eros in the months before this unsterile kiss, but perhaps some small and niggling part of me had believed it pity or forbearance, that his medieval virtues compelled him to love me in my dying. But non! It was this wink of time when I whorled toward understanding, into and resting in the arms of love we shared--an uncommon and vulnerable combination of the four loves we'd traveled with and toward: agape, storge, philia, and now, unquestionably, eros. Our journey--riddled with both pain and joy--culminated in a kiss I would never have anticipated as the revelation it became, as the comfort and mastery of love.

in describing the various writers of his idolatry he more than once lets fall a phrase that could equally apply to himself. 'To read Spenser,' he says, 'is to grow in mental health.' What he values in Addison is his 'open-mindedness.' The moments of despair chronicled in Scott's diary cannot, he claims, counterpoise 'that ease and good temper, that fine masculine cheerfulness' suffused through the best of the Waverly novels. Most of all it was the chiaroscuro of what Chaucer called 'earnest' and 'game' that attracted him. He found it eminently in the poetry of Dunbar, that late-medieval Scottish maker who wrote the greatest religious poetry and the earthiest satire in the language

In a letter, once, he drew me a picture, or allegorical diagram, imitated from the well-known frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan, which showed a Leviathan of human values. In the head there stood a figure labeled SAINT. In the heart, a figure labeled HERO. Twittering round the huge figure there was an insect-like object dressed as a man of fashion of the seventeenth century and labeled GENTLEMAN; from its mouth there issued a balloon in which was written in tiny letters: 'and where do I come in?'. Mirabel, he went on to say, was no part of the Everlasting Gospel, a phrase of Blake's that he had his own meaning for. Perhaps the hunger for magnitude that made him admire Gilgamesh and the Edda, and made Spenser and Milton his favourites, disabled him from an appreciation, which I could not deny, for a world of elegant cuckoldry and cynic wit, so seemingly heartless, a trifler's scum of humanity that sought to be taken for its cream.

I prefer my first word, 'formidable.' But this was softened by joviality in youth and kindliness in maturity. Genius is formidable and so is goodness; he had both. It is useful in a picture sometimes to introduce a balancing figure to give scale, and I would choose the figure of W. H. Auden as one of comparable impressiveness and goodness, felt as formidable and friendly.

I believe Williams was the only one of us, except perhaps Ronald Tolkien, from whom Lewis learnt any of his thinking. It was Charles Williams who expounded to him the doctrine of co-inherence and the idea that one had power to accept into one's own body the pain of someone else, through Christian love. This was a power...he had been allowed to use to ease the suffering of his wife, a cancer victim

I sense in his style an indefeasible core of Protestant certainties, the certainties of a simple, unchanging, entrenched ethic that knows how to distinguish, unarguably, between Right and Wrong, Natural and Unnatural, High and Low, Black and White, with a committed force, an ethic on which his ramified and seemingly conciliatory structures of argument are invisibly based

In the early 1920s, Lewis hoped to be remembered as an atheist poet, whose bitter and forceful condemnations of an uncaring and absent God would rid the world of any lingering religious belief. Today, he is remembered as one of the greatest Christian apologists of all time. He has become an ingredient of that greater story, and an encouragement to us to find our own place.

Is romantic yearning an appetite for [H]eaven, or is it the ultimate refinement of covetousness?

It may be that the Chronicles of Narnia may outlive The Allegory of Love, and Perelandra outlive them both. Few works of learning and criticism survive a hundred years; what it was learned to know in 1950 will be expected of scholarship-candidates in 2000; new things will be discovered, old notions disproved, other critical values asserted; but a piece of genuine imagination in fiction may have a long life.

It delighted him that he could find no use of the word modern in Shakespeare that did not carry its load of contempt.

I remember, on one occasion, as I went round Addison's Walk, I saw him coming slowly towards me, his round, rubicund face beaming with pleasure to itself. When we came within speaking distance, I said 'Hullo, Jack! You look very pleased with yourself; what is it?' 'I believe,' he answered, with a modest smile of triumph, 'I believe I have proved that the Renaissance never happened in England. Alternatively' - he held up his hand to prevent my astonished exclamation - 'that if it did, it had no importance!

Muddled minds read him, and found themselves moving with delight in a world of clarity.

It is one thing to understand the doctrine, and quite another to be masters of the controversy.' Lewis's ambition was of course to know the doctrine and to be master of the controversy.

On one occasion he was dining with me in Exeter college, placed on the right of the Rector. Rector Marett was a man of abundant geniality and intelligence...Presently he turned to Lewis and said: 'I saw in the papers this morning that there is some scientist-fellah in Vienna, called Voronoff - some name like that - who has invented a way of splicing the glands of young apes onto old gentlemen, thereby renewing their generative powers! Remarkable, isn't it?' Lewis thought. 'I would say "unnatural".' 'Come, come! "Unnatural"! What do you mean, "unnatural"? Voronoff is a part of Nature isn't he? What happens in Nature must surely be natural? Speaking as a philosopher, don't you know...I can attach no meaning to your objection; I don't understand you!' 'I am sorry, Rector; but I think any philosopher from Aristotle to - say - Jerremy Bentham, would have understood me.' 'Oh, well, we've got beyond Bentham by now, I hope. If Aristotle or he had known about Voronoff, they might have changed their ideas. Think of the possibilities he opens up! You'll be an old man yourself, one day.' 'I would rather be an old man than a young monkey.' We all laughed at this pay-off line, but behind the wit and the thinking-power lay the puritan strength; because he could also laugh, it seemed warm and humane; but it was unbending.

No one knew better than he how an understanding of poetry depends on an understanding of the poet's universe.

Man, to Lewis, is an immortal subject; pains are his moral remedies, salutary disciplines, willing sacrifices, playing their part in a drama of interchange between God and him.