“Humour is...the all-consoling and...the all-excusing, grace of life.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
―
C.S. Lewis
“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Has not one of the poets said that a noble friend is the best gift and a noble enemy the next best?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."
―
C.S. Lewis
“Got to start by finding it, have we? Can't start by looking for it, I suppose?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Look for the valleys, the green places, and fly through them. There will always be a way through.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“[The enemy] has filled His world full of pleasures . . . Everything has to be twisted before it is any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side. (Not that that excuses you...)”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.”
―
C.S. Lewis
