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C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis Quotes

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Famous C. S. Lewis Quotes

“Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority... Every historical event in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada.”

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Author:C. S. Lewis
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“It would be impossible to accept naturalism itself if we really and consistently believed naturalism. For naturalism is a system of thought. But for naturalism all thoughts are mere events with irrational causes. It is, to me at any rate, impossible to regard the thoughts which make up naturalism in that way and, at the same time, regard them as a real insight into external reality...If it is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat.”

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Book:God in the Dock
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“The naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one's own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote or abstruse; it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.”

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Book:Miracles: A Preliminary Study
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“Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.”

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Book:The Abolition of Man: C.S. Lewis’s Classic Essay on Objective Morality: A Critical Edition by Michael Ward
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“[Milton's] argument is (a) St. Augustine was wrong in thinking God's only purpose in giving Adam a female, instead of a male, companion, was copulation. For (b) there is a "peculiar comfort" in the society of man and woman "beside, (i.e. in addition to, apart from) the genial bed"; and (c) we know from Scripture that something analogous to "play" or "slackening the cords" occurs even in God. That is why the Song of Songs describes a thousand raptures...far on the hither side of carnal enjoyment.”

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Author:C. S. Lewis
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“In a sense it (Christianity) creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteousness and loving.”

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Book:The Problem of Pain
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