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
I think it very wrong to pray for people while they are in distress and then not to continue praying, now with thanksgiving, when they are relieved.
I pray because I can't help myself...
Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
When golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift?
I don't pray so that I can change God. I pray so that God can change me.
I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him.
I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. It doesn't change God - it changes me.
I sometimes wonder if all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys' philosophies--these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.
You can't really study people; you can only get to know them.
All the time the joke is that the word "mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either [Satan] or God will say "mine" of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.
The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
I have been feeling very much lately that cheerful insecurity is what our Lord asks of us.
You can give the Devil too much or too little attention.