Kael: CS Lewis Quotes part 1

Quotes on Action:

“Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.” (Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life)

Quotes on Behavior:

“This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.” (Mere Christianity)

Quotes on Belief:

“Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.” (A Grief Observed)

Quotes on the Bible:

“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.” (Letter (8 November 1952), published in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966))

Bureaucracy and Management:

“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.” (Preface, The Screwtape Letters)

Quotes on Children and Childishness:

“It is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are the most grown-up.” (The Silver Chair)

Quotes on Christianity:

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” ("Is Theology Poetry?", The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses)

"The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ." (Mere Christianity)

"Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self..." (Mere Christianity)

“The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or — if they think there is not — at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.” (Mere Christianity)

Quotes on Death:

“‘I have always — at least, ever since I can remember — had a kind of longing for death."
“‘Ah, Psyche,’ I said, ‘have I made you so little happy as that?’
“‘No, no no,’ she said. ‘You don't understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine … where you couldn't see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn't (not yet) come and I didn't know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.’” (Till We Have Faces)

Quotes on Democracy and Equality:

"Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death." (“Democratic Education,” Present Concerns)

"Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves." (“Democratic Education,” Present Concerns)

"The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior." (The Screwtape Letters)

"If there is equality it is in His love, not in us." (Transposition and Other Addresses)

Quotes on End of the World/Second Coming:

“The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question ‘What if this present were the world's last night?’ is equally relevant.” (“The World’s Last Night”)

Quotes on Evil:

"The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence." (Perelandra)

Quotes on False Religions:

“The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.” (The Great Divorce)

Quotes on Fantasy and Fairy-Tales:

“Most of the great fantasies and fairy-tales were not addressed to children at all, but to everyone.” (An Experiment in Criticism)

“He accuses all myth and fantasy and romance of wishful thinking: the way to silence him is to be more realistic than he – to lay our ears closer to the murmur of life as it actually flows through us at every moment and to discover there all that quivering and wonder and (in a sense) infinity which the literature that he calls realistic omits.” (“Hedonics,” Present Concerns)

Quotes on Free Will:

"If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying." (Mere Christianity)

Quotes on Friendship:

“Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’” (The Four Loves)

Quotes on God:

“We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place.) ...The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put in our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.” (Mere Christianity)

“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.” (The Problem of Pain)

"We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God." (Letters to Malcolm)

"We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it." (The Problem of Pain)

"From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it." (The Problem of Pain)

"It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men." (Reflections on the Psalms)

“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’.” (The Problem of Pain)

“I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is ‘nothing better’ now to be had.” (The Problem of Pain)

“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.” (Surprised by Joy)

“The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question ‘What if this present were the world's last night?’ is equally relevant.” (Mere Christianity)

Quotes on Grief:

“No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.” (A Grief Observed)

Quotes on Heaven:

“I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned…was precisely nothing: that the kernal of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in ‘the High Countries’.” (The Great Divorce, Preface)

Quotes on Hell:

“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” (The Screwtape Letters)

Quotes on History:

"History is a story written by the finger of God." (Christian Reflections)

"All that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy." (Mere Christianity)

Quotes on Human Nature:

"Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is..." (Mere Christianity)

"The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe." (Mere Christianity)

"Many things—such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly—are done worst when we try hardest to do them." (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature)

“There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.’” (The Screwtape Letters)

“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.” (The Screwtape Letters)

“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. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn't. If you leave out justice you'll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials ‘for the sake of humanity’ and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.” (Mere Christianity)

Quotes on Human Body:

“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!” (The Screwtape Letters)

Quotes on Imagination:

“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.” ("Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare", Rehabilitations)

Quotes on Intellect vs. Emotions:

"The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it." (The Abolition of Man)

"The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it." (The Abolition of Man)

Quotes on Intellectuals/Intelligentsia:

“We must get rid of our arrogant assumption that it is the masses who can be led by the nose. As far as I can make out, the shoe is on the other foot. The only people who are really the dupes of their favourite newspapers are the intelligentsia.” (“Private Bates,” Present Concerns)

Quotes on Judging:

"Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?" (A Preface to Paradise Lost)

“Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.” (A Preface to Paradise Lost)

Quotes on Literature:

“The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good.” (An Experiment in Criticism)

"It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations."(A Preface to Paradise Lost)

Quotes on Longing/Sehnsucht/Joy:

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." (Mere Christianity)

"It now seemed that...the deepest thirst within him was not adapted to the deepest nature of the world." (The Pilgrim's Regress)

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back." (Till We Have Faces)

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” (Mere Christianity)

Quotes on Love:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.” (The Four Loves)

“When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.” (The Screwtape Letters)

"Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness." (The Problem of Pain)

"Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal." (The Problem of Pain)

"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." (Answers to Questions on Christianity)

Quotes on Marriage:

“Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I'm afraid, even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.” (A Horse and His Boy, The Chronicles of Narnia)

Quotes on Medieval Times/Middle Ages:

"At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems.... Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index." (The Discarded Image)

Quotes on Moral Relativism and Natural Law:

"If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all." (The Abolition of Man)

http://cslewisjrrtolkien.classicalautographs.com/cslewis/quotes.html

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
C. S. Lewis