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There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he has read them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?

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
Thinking
Thinks
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Boswell
Read
Sonnets
Hope
Settles
Matter
Sonnet
Never
Shakespeare
Men
Settling

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves.
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Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.
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Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.
C. S. Lewis
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The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
C. S. Lewis
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But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want they do not always like it.
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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We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.
C. S. Lewis
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To please God… to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness… to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.
C. S. Lewis
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The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks
C. S. Lewis
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That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.
C. S. Lewis
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The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.
C. S. Lewis
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Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity, which, in spite of its divisions, it has never lost. I trembled on recognizing the same unmistakable aroma coming from the writings of Dante and Bunyan, Thomas Aquinas and William Law.
C. S. Lewis
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If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
C. S. Lewis
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Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
C. S. Lewis
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The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.
C. S. Lewis
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Puddleglum's my name. But it doesn't matter if you forget it. I can always tell you again.
C. S. Lewis
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That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.
C. S. Lewis
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Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.
C. S. Lewis
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God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
C. S. Lewis
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Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache it is our nature.
C. S. Lewis