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 the First World War, 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 extensive 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).
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Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: God, Religion, Questions
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
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: Literature, Books, Reality
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
Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.
—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
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
—C. S. Lewis
We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely.
—C. S. Lewis
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
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: Nature, Dying, Death
The longest way round is the shortest way home.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Haste
We must lay before him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Prayer
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
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
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
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
We meet no ordinary people in our lives.
—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
You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.
—C. S. Lewis
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
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
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
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