Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was a British academic, novelist, broadcaster, religious writer, literary scholar, and children’s writer.
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Lewis was the son of a solicitor. He was wounded in World War I, attended Oxford’s University College as a classicist, but made his career in English literature. Though a theological layman, Lewis became widely known as one of the most important Christian apologetics writers of the 20th century. His books The Problem of Pain (1940,) Miracles (1947,) and The Four Loves (1960) were highly influential. Lewis’s great reputation was largely due to his popular radio talks on religious themes, collected in Mere Christianity (1952.)
He held academic positions at both Oxford University and Cambridge University. He created the imaginary land of ‘Narnia’ for a series of seven fantasy stories, which began with the heavily allegorical and highly successful The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by C. S. Lewis
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
Topics: Perception, Character
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
—C. S. Lewis
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Thinking
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Miracles
Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Pleasure
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: God, Questions, Religion
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Money
I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in.
—C. S. Lewis
We must lay before him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Prayer
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
—C. S. Lewis
When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.
—C. S. Lewis
The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Knowledge
You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.
—C. S. Lewis
God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
—C. S. Lewis
We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely.
—C. S. Lewis
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.
—C. S. Lewis
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
Topics: Home
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Reality, Literature, Books
If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a “wandering to find home,” why should we not look forward to the arrival?
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Death, Dying, Nature
You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, said Aslan. And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.
—C. S. Lewis
The longest way round is the shortest way home.
—C. S. Lewis
I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God- it changes me.
—C. S. Lewis
What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Experience
Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.
—C. S. Lewis
The decay of logic results from an untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.
—C. S. Lewis
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you’re looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Pride
Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.
—C. S. Lewis
We meet no ordinary people in our lives.
—C. S. Lewis
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