Home > Work > C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet QUOTES

C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet QUOTES

1 " Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

2 " The imaginative is produced by the human mind as it tries to respond to something greater than itself, struggling to find images adequate to the reality. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

3 " On Tolkien: "His fussiness threatened to overwhelm his creativity. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

4 " When the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching but adoring, "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

5 " The study of the past helps us to appreciate that the ideas and values of our own age are just as provisional and transient as those of bygone ages. The intelligent and reflective engagement with the thought of a bygone era ultimately subverts any notion of "chronological snobbery". Reading texts from the past makes it clear that what we now term "the past" was once "the present", which proudly yet falsely regarded itself as having found the right intellectual answers and moral values that had eluded its predecessors. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

6 " The reading of old books enables us to avoid becoming passive captives of the Spirit of the Age by keeping “the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”415 "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

7 " Lewis's mental map of reality had difficulty accommodating the trauma of the Great War. Like so many, he found the settled way of looking at the world, taken for granted by many in the Edwardian age, to have been shattered by the most brutal and devastating war yet known." (51) Part (McGrath suggests) of Lewis's well-documented search for truth and meaning, that search that ultimately led him to Christianity, emerges from the desire to make sense of his traumatic experience in ways that satisfied him spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

8 " Christianity, rather than being one myth alongside many others, is thus the fulfilment of all previous mythological religions. Christianity tells a true story about humanity, which makes sense of all the stories that humanity tells about itself. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

9 " Lewis was thus drawn to Christianity not so much by the arguments in its favour, but by its compelling vision of reality, which he could not ignore—and, as events proved, could not resist. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

10 " Tolkien helped Lewis to realise that the problem lay not in Lewis’s rational failure to understand the theory, but in his imaginative failure to grasp its significance. The issue was not primarily about truth, but about meaning. When "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

11 " For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys “fundamental things”—in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. Myths "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

12 " Christianity brings to fulfilment and completion imperfect and partial insights about reality, scattered abroad in human culture. Tolkien gave Lewis a lens, a way of seeing things, which "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

13 " In 1962, Francine Smithline—a schoolgirl from New York—wrote to C. S. Lewis, telling him how much she had enjoyed his Narnia books and asking him for information about his own schooldays. In reply, Lewis informed her that he had attended three boarding schools, “of which two were very horrid.”42 In fact, Lewis continues, he “never hated anything as much, not even the front line trenches in World War I. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

14 " For Lewis, the narration of his own story was about the identification of a pattern of meaning. This enabled him to grasp the “big picture” and discern the “grand story” of all things, so that the snapshots and stories of his own life could assume a deeper meaning. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

15 " They taught me longing—Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

16 " Sehnsucht? The German word is rich with emotional and imaginative associations, famously described by the poet Matthew Arnold as a “wistful, soft, tearful longing.” And what of the “Blue Flower”? Leading German Romantic writers, such as Novalis (1772–1801) and Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857), used the image of a “Blue Flower” as a symbol of the wanderings and yearnings of the human soul, especially as this sense of longing is evoked—though not satisfied—by the natural world. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

17 " Yet Lewis quickly realised that he was being forced to develop his critical thinking, based on evidence and reason rather than his personal intuitions. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

18 " For Tolkien, a myth awakens in its readers a longing for something that lies beyond their grasp. Myths "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

19 " Lewis had discovered the calming and coping impact, not merely of reading literature, but of putting his feelings into his own words. It was as if the mental process of forging sentences tempered and tamed the emotions that originally inspired them. "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

20 " Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.”[ "

― Alister E. McGrath , C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet