WIST

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
“Answers to Questions on Christianity”

Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods, and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
“Learning in War-Time”

The word religion is extremely rare in the New Testament or the writings of mystics. The reason is simple. Those attitudes and practices to which we give the collective name of religion are themselves concerned with religion hardly at all. To be religious is to have one’s attention fixed on God and on one’s neighbor in relation to God. Therefore, almost by definition, a religious man, or a man when he is being religious, is not thinking about religion; he hasn’t the time. Religion is what we (or he himself at a later moment) call his activity from the outside.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
“Lilies that Fester,” The Twentieth Century (Apr 1955)

Democracy demands that little men shouldn’t take big ones too serious; it dies when it’s full of little men who think they are big themselves.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
“Notes on the Way,” Time and Tide (29 Apr 1944)

To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
“On Forgiveness”

There are many different ways of bringing people into his Kingdom, even some ways that I specially dislike! I have therefore learned to be cautious in my judgment.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
“The Final Interview of C. S. Lewis,” Sherwood Eliot Wirt, Decision (Sep 1963)
Full text.

Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
“The Final Interview of C. S. Lewis,” Sherwood Eliot Wirt, Decision (Sep 1963)
Full text.

Such a book has of course its predestined readers, even now more numerous and more critical than is always realised. To them a reviewer need say little, except that here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
“The Gods Return to Earth,” Time and Tide (14 Aug 1954)
Book review of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring. Full text.

We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who are the minor characters. The Author knows. … But we, never seeing the play from the outside, … cannot tell at what moment the end ought to come. That it will come when it ought, we may be sure. … That it has a meaning we may be sure, but we cannot see it. When it is over, we may be told. We are led to expect that the Author will have something to say to each of us who has played. The playing it well is what matters infinitely.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
“The World’s Last Night”

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not now either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening towards active assistance, is simply bad.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

I’m not sure God wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

There seems no plan because it’s all plan. There seems no center because it’s all center.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
(Attributed)

Your bid–for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity–will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high. Nothing will shake a man–or at any rate a man like me–out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
A Grief Observed

What do people mean when they say, “I am not afraid of God because I know He is good”? Have they never been to a dentist?

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
A Grief Observed (1961)

Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
A Grief Observed (1961)

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not, “So, there’s no God after all,” but, “So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.”

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
A Grief Observed, ch. 1

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them — never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
A Grief Observed, ch. 4 (1960)

It is in their ‘good’ characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942)

People blush at praise — not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942)

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942)

In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer and scholar [Clive Staples Lewis]
An Experiment in Criticism (1961)