C.S. Lewis Quotes - Page 9

Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

All that we call human history-money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

When we mention our personal opinions we must always make quite clear the difference between them and the Faith itself . . .

You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the 'best' people, the 'right' food, the 'important' books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.

Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about.

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

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.

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

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.

I was with book, as a woman is with child.

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.

And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.

Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.

لا أتخيل أن هناك من يستمتع جداً بكتاب .. ويقرأه مرة واحدة !!ـ

It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests.