C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Quotes

• Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one.

• It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

• Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.

• We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

• Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.

• Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

• Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

• Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.

• Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly.

• Many things--such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly--are done worst when we try hardest to do them.

• If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents - the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's. But if their thoughts - i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy - are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true?
  
  I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents.
  
  It's like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.

• If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of '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.

• The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

• The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don't.

• No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

• When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.