C. S. Lewis Quotes About Literature
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I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
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A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.
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An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
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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.
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The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.
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With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
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Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
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Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
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Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.
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Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
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If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
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Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
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The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
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A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
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In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.
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Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
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Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
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If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
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Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.
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Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
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The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
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But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
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Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
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It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
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A work of (whatever) art can be either 'received' or 'used'. ...'Using' is inferior to 'reception' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it ... When the art in question is literature a complication arises, for to 'receive' significant words is always, in one sense, to 'use' them, to go through and beyond them to an imagined something which is not itself verbal.
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Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
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