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If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which 'took these things into account' was not faith but imagination.

C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis
Age: 64 †
Born: 1898
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Broadcaster
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Belfast
Ireland
Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
Cards
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Blow
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Imagination
Faith
House
Collapsed
Things
Account

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, . . . they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.
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True friends... face in the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals.
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Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.
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Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for to make them worth it.
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Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them.
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I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
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A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.
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Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.
C. S. Lewis
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Nothing less will shake a man — or at any rate a man like me — out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.
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Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life.
C. S. Lewis
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until the theologians and the ordained clergy begin to communicate with ordinary people in the vernacular, in a way that they can understand, I’m going to have to do this sort of thing.
C. S. Lewis
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and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing a very serious thing indeed.
C. S. Lewis
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A promise must be about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling a certain way.
C. S. Lewis
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Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.
C. S. Lewis
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And men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear
C. S. Lewis
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[the difference between the old and the new education being] in a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men the new is merely propaganda.
C. S. Lewis
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When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.
C. S. Lewis
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I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.... I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
C. S. Lewis