Christian author (1898-1963)
To think that the spectre you see is an illusion does not rob him of his terrors: it simply adds the further terror of madness itself -- and then on top of that the horrible surmise that those whom the rest call mad have, all along, been the only people who see the world as it really is.
C. S. LEWIS
Perelandra
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
C. S. LEWIS
dedication, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
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".
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.
C. S. LEWIS
The Abolition of Man
There is only one way fit for a man -- Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.
C. S. LEWIS
The Pilgrim's Regress
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
C. S. LEWIS
A Grief Observed
People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
C. S. LEWIS
letter to Sir Henry Willink, December 3, 1959
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, "Peace, child; you don't understand."
C. S. LEWIS
A Grief Observed
God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn that water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah's time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see. Either like the Pagans they refer the process to some finite spirit, Bacchus or Dionysus: or else, like the moderns, they attribute real and ultimate causality to the chemical and other material phenomena which are all that our sense can discover in it. But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off. The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana.
C. S. LEWIS
God in the Dock
Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam--he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.
C. S. LEWIS
On Stories and Other Essays in Literature
This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again.... God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
C. S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters
The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.
C. S. LEWIS
"On Stories", Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt one, those who keep silence hurt more. They help to increase the sense of general isolation which makes a sort of fringe to the sorrow itself.
C. S. LEWIS
letter to Sir Henry Willink, December 3, 1959
Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
C. S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters
Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
Which of the religions of the world gives to its followers the greatest happiness? While it lasts, the religion of worshipping oneself is the best.
C. S. LEWIS
God in the Dock
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C. S. LEWIS
A Grief Observed
The Spirit of the Age wishes to allow argument and not to allow argument.... If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue themselves to show that their own doctrines are true.... You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.
C. S. LEWIS
The Pilgrim's Regress