C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewiswas a British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer, and Christian apologist. He held academic positions at both Oxford University, 1925–54, and Cambridge University, 1954–63. He is best known for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth29 November 1898
CountryIreland
Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise or a sacrilegious abuse of an authority by divine right.
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.
We are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that the mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.
Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.
When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft. Protestantism,in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being too much like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.
You can't just go on being a good egg. You must either hatch or go bad!
In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes; in the myth it is a fact about improvements.
Is any pleasure on Earth as great as a circle of Christian friends?
Above all else , the devil can not stand to be mocked.
The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story.
The only thing one can usually change in one's situation is oneself. And yet one can't change that either-only ask Our Lord to do so.
When we are lost in the woods, the sight of a signpost is a great matter.
A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed.