“I’ve read it already” by C.S. Lewis

“The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. We have all known women who remembered a novel so dimly that they had to stand for half an hour in the library skimming through it before they were certain they [...]

“Literary people” by C.S. Lewis

“[Unliterary people], though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called ‘reading oneself [...]

“The diagnosis is very bad news” by C.S. Lewis

“When the apostles preached, they could assume even in their Pagan hearers a real consciousness of deserving the Divine anger. The Pagan mysteries existed to allay this consciousness, and the Epicurean philosophy claimed to deliver men from the fear of eternal punishment.
It was against this background that the Gospel appeared as good news. It brought [...]

“Remember your fairy tales” by C.S. Lewis

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things– the beauty, the memory of our own past– are good images of what we really [...]

“We have an errand to the world’s edge” by C.S. Lewis

At this point Caspian jumped to his feet. “Friends,” he said, “I think you have not quite understood our purpose. You talk as if we had come to you with our hat in our hand, begging for shipmates. It isn’t like that at all. We and our royal brother and sister and their kinsman and [...]

“Music or martyrdom” by C.S. Lewis

“What is looked for in us, as men, is another kind of glorifying, which depends on intention. How easy or how hard it may be for a whole choir to preserve that intention through all the discussions and decisions, all the corrections and disappointments, all the temptations to pride, rivalry and ambition, which precede the [...]

“We do not know the play” by C.S. Lewis

“The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph. This seems to some people intolerably frustrating. So many things would be interrupted. Perhaps you were going [...]

“The World’s Last Night” by C.S. Lewis

“There are many reasons why the modern Christian and even the modern theologian may hesitate to give to the doctrine of Christ’s Second Coming that emphasis which was usually laid on it by our ancestors. Yet it seems to me impossible to retain in any recognisable form our belief in the Divinity of Christ and [...]

“Like Hamlet looking for Shakespeare” by C.S. Lewis

“When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and reported that he had not found God, C. S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle and looking for Shakespeare.”
–Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York: Dutton, 2008), 122.

“Heaven will work backwards” by C.S. Lewis

“That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: HarpersCollins, 1946), 69.

“Books and tea” by C.S. Lewis

“You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
–C.S. Lewis, On Stories (New York: Harcourt, 1966/1982), ix.

“The only safe rule” by C.S. Lewis

“In the passage where the New Testament says that every one must work, it gives as a reason ‘in order that he may have something to give to those in need.’ Charity– giving to the poor– is an essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats it seems [...]

“Those are the golden sessions” by C.S. Lewis

“In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. Especially [...]

“Read with him, argue with him, pray with him” by C.S. Lewis

“One knows nobody so well as one’s ‘fellow.’ Every step of the common journey tests his metal; and the tests are tests we fully understand because we are undergoing them ourselves. Hence, as he rings true time after time, our reliance, our respect and our admiration blossom into an Appreciative love of a singularly robust [...]

“Men must endure their going hence” by C.S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis
November 29, 1898 – November 22, 1963
“Men must endure their going hence.”