Light on C. S. Lewis Quotes

“His conversion to Christianity seems to have come about largely by thinking...It did not come by sudden intuition, or overwhelming vision, or even by the more usual path of conviction of sin calling for repentance and atonement.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“On one occasion he was dining with me in Exeter college, placed on the right of the Rector. Rector Marett was a man of abundant geniality and intelligence...Presently he turned to Lewis and said:
'I saw in the papers this morning that there is some scientist-fellah in Vienna, called Voronoff - some name like that - who has invented a way of splicing the glands of young apes onto old gentlemen, thereby renewing their generative powers! Remarkable, isn't it?'
Lewis thought.
'I would say "unnatural".'
'Come, come! "Unnatural"! What do you mean, "unnatural"? Voronoff is a part of Nature isn't he? What happens in Nature must surely be natural? Speaking as a philosopher, don't you know...I can attach no meaning to your objection; I don't understand you!'
'I am sorry, Rector; but I think any philosopher from Aristotle to - say - Jerremy Bentham, would have understood me.'
'Oh, well, we've got beyond Bentham by now, I hope. If Aristotle or he had known about Voronoff, they might have changed their ideas. Think of the possibilities he opens up! You'll be an old man yourself, one day.'
'I would rather be an old man than a young monkey.'
We all laughed at this pay-off line, but behind the wit and the thinking-power lay the puritan strength; because he could also laugh, it seemed warm and humane; but it was unbending.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“he gave an account of the Spenserian world that championed its ethical attitudes as well as their fairy-tale terms, with a rich joy in the defeat of dragons, giants, sorcerers, and sorceresses by the forces of virtue; it was a world he could inhabit and believe in as one inhabits and believes a dream of one's own; its knights, dwarfs, and ladies were real to him...he rejoiced as much in the ugliness of the giants and in the beauty of the ladies as in their spiritual significances, but most of all in the ambience of the faerie forest and plain that, he said, were carpeted with a grass greener than the common stuff of ordinary glades; this was the reality of grass, only to be apprehended in poetry: the world of the imagination was nearer to the truth than the world of the senses, notwithstanding its palpable fictions, and Spenser transcended sensuality by making use of it”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“Fine scholar though he was, he was an even better teacher; and it may truly be said of him...that in turning men's minds to the Middle Ages he 'stimulated their mental thirst...silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles'.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“[Lewis had a] determined impersonality towards all except his very closest friends.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“[Lewis had a] determined impersonality towards all except his very close friends.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“Lewis lived in as good a setting as any man for the life of vigilant aestheticism...His rooms were on the first floor of New Buildings 3, and ran the width of the building, so that the sitting-room looked out on Magdalen Grove, the other half of the suite commanding the Cloister, and, in the background, the incomparable Tower.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“Dons to me were sports-jacketed figures with pastel ties, reclining under the great chestnut-tree at Balliol in apparent indolence, but all the while razor-keen to detect inconsistencies in attitude or standpoint. I say 'attitude or standpoint' since formal argument held little appeal. I agreed...that some of the inconsistencies...could be approached ratiocinatively, and examined for logical contradiction; but the deeper kinds of awareness were to be reached intuitively rather than through rationalizations. This in fact constituted my justification for studying imaginative literature...rather than history or philosophy or psychology. I held that when one sensed (rather than 'detected') a defect of style, a false emphasis of rhythm, or an inadequate characterization, one was at that point gaining insight into the real subject of enquiry, through the gap between the thing made and its potentiality; and from that point one must go forward and into the work, not outward into analogy and speculation, however brilliant. What I was looking for was not a methodology but a way of life, one which would encourage and sustain a maximum receptivity to works of art.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“It is one thing to understand the doctrine, and quite another to be masters of the controversy.' Lewis's ambition was of course to know the doctrine and to be master of the controversy.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“There was...the discrepancy between what one expected of the accomplished medieval scholar (and, later, the penetrating exponent of theological and spiritual matters) and the robust, no-nonsense, unmistakably strident man, clumsy in movement and in dress, apparently little sensitive to the feelings of others, determined to cut his way to the heart of any matter with shouts of distinguo! before re-shaping it entirely. One quickly felt that for him dialectic supplied the place of conversation. Any general remarks were of an obvious and even platitudinous kind; talk was dead timber until the spark of argument flashed. Then in a trice you were whisked from particular to fundamental principles; thence (if you wanted) to eternal verities; and Lewis was alert for any riposte you could muster. It was comic as well as breathtaking; and Lewis would see the comedy as readily as the next man.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“I prefer my first word, 'formidable.' But this was softened by joviality in youth and kindliness in maturity. Genius is formidable and so is goodness; he had both. It is useful in a picture sometimes to introduce a balancing figure to give scale, and I would choose the figure of W. H. Auden as one of comparable impressiveness and goodness, felt as formidable and friendly.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“His sentences are in homely English, and yet there is something Roman in the easy handling of clauses, and something Greek in their ascent from analogy to idea.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“It may be that the Chronicles of Narnia may outlive The Allegory of Love, and Perelandra outlive them both. Few works of learning and criticism survive a hundred years; what it was learned to know in 1950 will be expected of scholarship-candidates in 2000; new things will be discovered, old notions disproved, other critical values asserted; but a piece of genuine imagination in fiction may have a long life.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“I asked him how he came to be writing for the popular American weekly. How did he know what to write about or what to say? 'Oh...they have somehow got the idea that I am an unaccountably paradoxical dog, and they name the subject on which they want me to write; and they pay generously.' 'And so you set to work and invent a few paradoxes?' 'Not a bit of it. What I do is to recall, as well as I can, what my mother used to say on the subject, eke it out with a few similar thoughts of my own, and so produce what would have been strict orthodoxy in about 1900. And this seems to them outrageously paradoxical, avant garde stuff.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“I asked him how he came to be writing for the popular American weekly. How did he know what to write about or what to say? 'Oh...they have somehow got the idea that I am an unaccountably paradoxical dog, and they name the subject on which they want me to write; and they pay generously.' 'And so you set to work and invent a few paradoxes?' Not a bit of it. What I do is to recall, as well as I can, what my mother used to say on the subject, eke it out with a few similar thoughts of my own, and so produce what would have been strict orthodoxy in about 1900. And this seems to them outrageously paradoxical, avant garde stuff.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“The gift of phrase was instantaneous in him, and that must partly account for his huge output; but there was a plentitude of mind as well as a swiftness of phrase to help him; he never put a nib wrong.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“The gift of phrase was instantaneous to him in him, and that must partly account for his huge output; but there was a plentitude of mind as well as a swiftness of phrase to help him; he never put a nib wrong.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“he almost never spoke about himself, in my hearing at least: though once, shortly after his marriage, when he brought his wife to lunch with me, he said...looking at her across the grassy quadrangle, 'I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my twenties.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“life-giving generosity was another depth in Lewis's nature that was part of his greatness”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“I believe Williams was the only one of us, except perhaps Ronald Tolkien, from whom Lewis learnt any of his thinking. It was Charles Williams who expounded to him the doctrine of co-inherence and the idea that one had power to accept into one's own body the pain of someone else, through Christian love. This was a power...he had been allowed to use to ease the suffering of his wife, a cancer victim”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“No one knew better than he how an understanding of poetry depends on an understanding of the poet's universe.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“His Christianity, so important to him personally, was also important professionally, for it enabled him to enter into fuller imaginative sympathy with the Middle Ages and Renaissance...and give spiritual substance to his life's work in those fields, so penetrated by Christian thought.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“I remember, on one occasion, as I went round Addison's Walk, I saw him coming slowly towards me, his round, rubicund face beaming with pleasure to itself. When we came within speaking distance, I said 'Hullo, Jack! You look very pleased with yourself; what is it?'
'I believe,' he answered, with a modest smile of triumph, 'I believe I have proved that the Renaissance never happened in England. Alternatively' - he held up his hand to prevent my astonished exclamation - 'that if it did, it had no importance!”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“It delighted him that he could find no use of the word modern in Shakespeare that did not carry its load of contempt.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“He had little sympathy...for Mirabel, and little for what I have called the New Sensibility of the early 'twenties, for its flat bleakness, its lawless versification, its unheroic tone, its unintelligible images, its 'modernity' in short.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“I sense in his style an indefeasible core of Protestant certainties, the certainties of a simple, unchanging, entrenched ethic that knows how to distinguish, unarguably, between Right and Wrong, Natural and Unnatural, High and Low, Black and White, with a committed force, an ethic on which his ramified and seemingly conciliatory structures of argument are invisibly based”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“The marks of this style are weight and clarity of argument, sudden turns of generalization and genial paradox, the telling short sentence to sum a complex paragraph, and unexpected touches of personal approach to the reader, whom he always assumes to be as logical, as learned, as romantic, and as open to conviction as himself. Not that in fact he was easily open to conviction; perhaps 'open to argument' would be a truer description.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“Like Johnson, Lewis was more impressive in his conversation than in his poetry, and more impressive in his prose - particularly in his learned prose - than in his conversation.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“There were many echoes of Johnson in Lewis. Both were formidable in their learning and in the range of their conversation, both had the same delight in argument, and in spite of their regard for truth, would argue for victory. Lewis had Johnson's handiness with the butt end of a pistol if an argument misfired. Like Johnson, he was a largish, unathletic-looking man, heavy but not tall, with a roundish, florid face that perspired easily and showed networks of tiny blood-vessels on close inspection; he had a dark flop of hair and rather heavily pouched eyes; these eyes gave life to the face, they were large and brown and unusually expressive. The main effects were of a mild, plain powerfulness, and over all there was a sense of simple masculinity, of a virility absorbed into intellectual life. He differed in his youth from most others of his age by seeming to have no sexual problems or preoccupations, or need to talk about them if he had them”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“He often expressed his amazement...at the power of theatre to transfigure a play, and inject it with significances he could never have imagined without it: yet for all that, he did not change custom or become a theatregoer, and this...was a part of the price he had to pay for a habit of Protestantism.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis