Quote

Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.

C. S. Lewis

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Generations
Predecessors
Environment
Exercises
Power
Provoking
Rebel
Modifies
Generation
Bequeathed
Tradition
Resists
Limits
Rebels
Exercise
Successors

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

Image
No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.
C. S. Lewis
Image
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.
C. S. Lewis
Image
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.
C. S. Lewis
Image
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.
C. S. Lewis
Image
What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.
C. S. Lewis
Image
We know nothing of religion here: we only think of Christ.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.
C. S. Lewis
Image
The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.
C. S. Lewis
Image
The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters.
C. S. Lewis
Image
A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
C. S. Lewis
Image
The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.
C. S. Lewis
Image
We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.
C. S. Lewis
Image
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.
C. S. Lewis
Image
You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.
C. S. Lewis
Image
As St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only as harmless as doves, but also as wise as serpents. He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head.
C. S. Lewis
Image
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
C. S. Lewis
Image
But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves.
C. S. Lewis