Christian author (1898-1963)
Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.
C. S. LEWIS
The Magician's Nephew
Sanity ... had it ever been more than a convention -- a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?
C. S. LEWIS
Perelandra
Time is the very lens through which ye see -- small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope -- something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality.
C. S. LEWIS
The Great Divorce
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.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.
C. S. LEWIS
"On Stories", Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
Honest rejection of Christ, however mistaken, will be forgiven and healed ... but to evade the Son of Man, to look the other way, to pretend you haven't noticed, to become suddenly absorbed in something on the other side of the street, to leave the receiver off the telephone because it might be He who was ringing up, to leave unopened certain letters in a strange handwriting because they might be from Him -- this is a different matter. You may not be certain yet whether you ought to be a Christian; but you do know you ought to be a Man, not an ostrich, hiding its head in the sand.
C. S. LEWIS
"Man or Rabbit", God in the Dock
It is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are the most grown-up.
C. S. LEWIS
The Silver Chair
Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?
C. S. LEWIS
Till We Have Faces
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.
C. S. LEWIS
"On Three Ways of Writing for Children"
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
C. S. LEWIS
God in the Dock
Always winter but never Christmas.
C. S. LEWIS
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity.
C. S. LEWIS
God in the Dock
No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.
C. S. LEWIS
The Great Divorce
The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.
C. S. LEWIS
The World's Last Night
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
C. S. LEWIS
preface, The Screwtape Letters
Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.
C. S. LEWIS
Surprised by Joy
[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.
C. S. LEWIS
The Great Divorce
Miracles in fact 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
God in the Dock
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.
C. S. LEWIS
The Horse and His Boy