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
The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.
No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly
If crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call 'disease' can be treated as a crime and compulsorily cured.
Hell is a state of mind -- ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind -- is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.
Through pride the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every vice, it's the complete anti-God state of mind.
The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind.
The idea which...shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience.
It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.
'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'
It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.
We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect but how we should pray being as we now are ... It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. No belief will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.
When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.