C.S. Lewis Quotes

Quotes by and about C.S. Lewis

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Lewis: "Only [with] ... a common human law ... which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike [can we have] a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery."

Lewis: "You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away."

Lewis: "It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' [everything]. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see."

Lewis: "There is something which unites magic and applied science. ... For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men."

Lewis: "The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse."

Lewis: "Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each [scientific] advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger."

Lewis: "It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour."

Lewis: "We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them. ... The first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil ... may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety."

Lewis: "The object [that is] stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity is [not] wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. ... The object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost."

Lewis: "The later a generation comes ... the less power it will have. ... The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners [of the past] and will themselves exercise least power upon the future."

Ayn Rand: "[C.S. Lewis] actually means that the more man ... is bound by reality, the more he has to comply with ... the existence of absolute identity and causality ... [the more reality has] 'power over man.' ... What he objects to is the power of reality. [He is opposed to science because] science shrinks the realm of his whim."

Ayn Rand: "When [C.S. Lewis] speaks of value judgments, [what] he [really] means values set by whim - and he knows that there is no place for that in nature, i.e. in reality."

Lewis [to Tolkien:] "There is too little of that we really like in stories. ... We shall have to try and write some ourselves."