Christian author (1898-1963)
What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
C. S. LEWIS
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time.
C. S. LEWIS
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.
C. S. LEWIS
"On Stories", Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable. So that what seems the ugly doctrine is one that comforts and strengthens you in the end. The people who try to hold an optimistic view of this world would become pessimists: the people who hold a pretty stern view of it become optimistic.
C. S. LEWIS
God in the Dock
If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic -- to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them.
C. S. LEWIS
God in the Dock
I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.
C. S. LEWIS
letter to Sheldon Vanauken, December 14, 1950
I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.
C. S. LEWIS
The World's Last Night
God lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
When our participation in a rite becomes perfect we think no more of ritual, but are engrossed by that about which the rite is performed; but afterwards we recognize that ritual was the sole method by which this concentration could be achieved.
C. S. LEWIS
A Preface to Paradise Lost
The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.
C. S. LEWIS
A Preface to Paradise Lost
The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.
C. S. LEWIS
"Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: A Review", On Stories and Other Essays on Literature
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.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.
C. S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
C. S. LEWIS
The Weight of Glory
I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.
C. S. LEWIS
The Silver Chair
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men.
C. S. LEWIS
Surprised by 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.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask -- half our great theological and metaphysical problems -- are like that.
C. S. LEWIS
A Grief Observed
Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.
C. S. LEWIS
The Silver Chair
For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.
C. S. LEWIS
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics