C.S. Lewis Quotes - Page 7

Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would he also be "reasonable" [...]

When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamor of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

I have come," said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.

But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history - that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires.

You can't know, you can only believe - or not.

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

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

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.

A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.

we (modern society) make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

…the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects, we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

the difference between the old and the new education being) in a word, the old was a kind of propagation - men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

Planning has no magic whereby you can elicit figs from thistles or choke-pears from vines. The rich, sappy, fruit-laden tree will bear sweetness, and strength and spiritual health: the dry, prickly, withered tree will teach hate, jealousy, suspicion, and inferiority complex – whatever you TELL it to teach.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...

You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you," said the Lion.