Clive S Lewis - Collected Quotes

"This is called the inductive method. Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact." (Clive S Lewis, "The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism", 1933)

"If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant - but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error." (Clive S Lewis, "Bulverism", 1941)

"The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the 'present state of the question'. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge - to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior - this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that 'history is bunk." (C. S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters", 1942)

"A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on." (Clive S Lewis, "The Great Divorce", 1945)

"A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating." (Clive S Lewis, "Mere Christianity", 1952)

"It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts […]." (Clive S Lewis, “The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature”, 1964)

"The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time." (Clive S Lewis, "Christian Reflections", 1967)

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” (Clive S Lewis)

"Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them." (Clive S Lewis)