Quote

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

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
Looks
Receive
First
Demand
Work
Listen
Way
Upon
Makes
Art
Look
Firsts
Surrender

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.
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The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.
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In the truest sense, Christian pilgrims have the best of both worlds. We have joy whenever this world reminds us of the next, and we take solace whenever it does not.
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Five senses an incurably abstract intellect a haphazardly selective memory a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.
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God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
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We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.
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When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.
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You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.
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Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.
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The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!
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And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.
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To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is 'remains.'
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Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want
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Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
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The true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.
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Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.
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The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike...Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.
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The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil’s whole structure away.
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Lucy looked and saw that Aslan had just breathed on the feet of the stone giant. It's all right! shouted Aslan joyously. Once The feet are put right, all the rest of him will follow.
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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