Clive Staples Lewis > Quotes

“I'm not saying these things in blame of you, dear Prince," answered the Doctor. "You may well ask why I say them at all. But I have two reasons. Firstly, because my old heart has carried these secret memories so long that it aches with them and would burst if I did not whisper them to you. But secondly, for this: that when you become King you may help us, for I know that you also, Telmarine though you are, love the Old Things.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, Prince Caspian

“About a week after this it was quite certain that Digory's Mother was getting better. About a fortnight later she was able to sit out in the garden. And a month later that whole house had become a different place. Aunt Letty did everything that Mother liked; windows were opened, frowsy curtains were drawn back to brighten up the rooms, there were new flowers everywhere, and nicer things to eat, and the old piano was tuned and Mother took up her singing again, and had such games with Digory and Polly that Aunt Letty would say "I declare, Mabel, you're the biggest baby of the three.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

“Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle. (...) There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“I think that real landscapes enter into pictures, not that pictures will one day sprout out into real trees and grass”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“And the sceptic’s conclusion that the so-called spiritual is really derived from the natural, that it is a mirage or projection or imaginary extension of the natural, is also exactly as we should expect; for, as we have seen, this is the mistake which an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make in any case of Transposition. The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find anything but flat shapes in a picture; physiology never can find anything in thought except twichings of the grey matter. It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition form below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible. Everything is different when you approach a Transposition from above.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Since then, we have begun to see why our Oppressor was so secretive. His throne depends on the secret. Members of His faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came to understand what He means by Love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven. And there lies the great task. We know that He cannot really love: nobody can: it doesn't make sense. If we could only find out what He is really up to!”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude, however unlikely the conclusion seems, that you have a taste for middle-aged moralising.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“C'è chi ha ritenuto che tutti questi amori fossero copie del nostro amore per il Signore".
"Ma certamente l'avranno considerato e respinto. Le loro scienza l'hanno confutato".
"Non hanno potuto farlo perché le loro scienze non sono per nulla interessate nelle relazioni generali di questo paese per alcuna cosa che possa trovarsi a oriente o a occidente di esso. Ti diranno sicuramente che le loro ricerche hanno provato che se due cose sono similari, quella bella è sempre la copia di quella brutta. Ma l'unica loro ragione nel fare questa affermazione è che hanno già deciso che la cosa più bella di tutte-cioè a dire il Signore e, se vuoi, le montagne e l'Isola-non sono altro che una copia di questo paese. Hanno la presunzione che le loro ricerche cunducano a quella dottrina; ma in effetti, danno per scontata prima di tutto quella dottrina ed interpretano le loro ricerche a partire da essa".
"Ma hanno delle buone ragioni per ritenerlo".
"Non ne hanno nessuna, perché hanno smesso di dare ascolto alle sole persone che possono dire alcunché sull'argomento".
"Chi sono queste persone?"
"Sono due mie sorelle, più giovani di me, e i loro nomi sono Filosofia e Teologia".
"Sorelle! E chi è vostro padre?"
"Lo saprai più presto di quel che credi".”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress

“Reid y no temáis, criaturas. Ahora que ya no sois mudas ni necias, no tenéis por qué mostraros siempre solemnes. Pues los chistes, igual que la justicia, van unidos al habla.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― Clive Staples Lewis

“Teach him to call it ‘real-life and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’. (...) Never having been human (...) you don’t realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. (...) Thanks to processes we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. (...) But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is ‘the results of modern investigation’. Do remember you are there to fuddle him.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“O espírito desse esquema, ainda que não em todos os detalhes, está bem presente no Modelo Medieval. E se o leitor suspender sua descrença e exercitar sua imaginação neste assunto, mesmo que só por alguns minutos, acho que tomará consciência do amplo reajuste envolvido na leitura atenta dos poetas antigos. Encontrará toda a sua atitude perante o Universo invertida. No pensamento moderno, isto é, no pensamento evolucionário, o homem está no topo de uma escada cuja base se perde na escuridão; nesse Modelo, ele está na base de uma escada cujo topo é invisível por causa da luz ofuscante. Também compreenderá que algo, além do gênio individual, ajudou a dar aos anjos de Dante aquela majestade inigualável. Milton, ao perseguir esse objetivo, errou o alvo. O classicismo entrou no meio. Seus anjos têm anatomia demais, armaduras demais, e são por demais parecidos com os deuses de Homero e Virgílio, e (por essa mesma razão) são muito pouco parecidos com os deuses do paganismo em seus desenvolvimentos religiosos mais elevados. Depois de Milton, instaurou-se a degradação completa e, por fim, chegamos aos anjos puramente consoladores - portanto, femininos e aguados - da arte do século XIX.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

“You can say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true. If any of them do not appeal to you, leave it alone and get on with the formula that does. And, whatever you do, do not start quarreling with other people because they use a different formula from yours.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, Mere Christianity

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― Clive Staples Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress

“It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“But we need not surrender the love of nature--chastened and limited as I have suggested--to the debunkers. Nature cannot satisfy the desires she arouses nor answer theological questions nor sanctify us. Our real journey to God involves constantly turning our backs on her; passing from the dawn-lit fields into some poky little church, or (it might be) going to work in an East End parish. But the love of her has been a valuable and, for some people, an indispensable initiation.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Four Loves

“If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.”
― Clive Staples Lewis

“Solo conocéis un alma en toda la creación; y esa es la única cuyo destino está en vuestras manos”
― Clive Staples Lewis, Mere Christianity

“It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilised taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to Top People.”
― Clive Staples Lewis

“If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is silly, then to complain that the something more is not simple very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy Christianity.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, Mere Christianity

“We are what we believe we are.”
― Clive Staples Lewis

“I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful a midnight, to receive you.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“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.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, Mere Christianity

“You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.”
― Clive Staples Lewis

“We could almost say He sees because
He loves, and therefore loves although He sees.”
― Clive Staples Lewis

“Non si è fantasmi nelle terre che ci appartengono.”
― Clive Staples Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia 7-Book Box Set + Trivia Book Includes The Magician's Nephew,The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy,Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ,The Silver Chair, The Last Battle, +Trivia Book +Bookmark