C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewiswas a British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer, and Christian apologist. He held academic positions at both Oxford University, 1925–54, and Cambridge University, 1954–63. He is best known for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth29 November 1898
CountryIreland
Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.
Whenever a person dwells chiefly, or even frequently, on the faults of other people's religions, he is in a bad condition.
The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection.
Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things.
There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than the doctrine of hell, if it lay in my power. But it has the support of Scripture and, especially, of our Lord's own words; it has always been held by the Christian Church, and it has the support of reason.
The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.
The Christian idea of 'putting on Christ' is the whole of Christianity.
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.
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.
And all the time - such is the tragic comedy of our situation - we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. We 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.
For the Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will most certainly be wrung and possibly broken ... The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
Because we love something else more than this world, we love even this world more than those who know no other.