The Reading Life Quotes

“Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty... The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“For every thought can be expressed in a number of different ways: and style is the art of expressing a given thought in the most beautiful words and rhythms of words. For instance a man might say ‘When the constellations which appear at early morning joined in musical exercises and the angelic spirits loudly testified to their satisfaction’. Expressing exactly the same thought, the Authorized Version says ‘When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy’. Thus by the power of style what was nonsense becomes ineffably beautiful.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others’ Eyes

“The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others’ Eyes

“Incidentally, what is the point of keeping in touch with the contemporary scene? Why should one read authors one doesn’t like because they happen to be alive at the same time as oneself?”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others’ Eyes

“On the Dangers of Confusing Saga with History The Four Loves (From Chapter II, “Likings and Loves for the Sub-human”) THE ACTUAL HISTORY OF EVERY COUNTRY IS FULL OF shabby and even shameful doings. The heroic stories, if taken to be typical, give a false impression of it and are often themselves open to serious historical criticism. Hence a patriotism based on our glorious past is fair game for the debunker. As knowledge increases it may snap and be converted into disillusioned cynicism, or may be maintained by a voluntary shutting of the eyes. But who can condemn what clearly makes many people, at many important moments, behave so much better than they could have done without its help? I think it is possible to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up. The image becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study. The stories are best when they are handed on and accepted as stories. I do not mean by this that they should be handed on as mere fictions (some of them are after all true). But the emphasis should be on the tale as such, on the picture which fires the imagination, the example that strengthens the will. The schoolboy who hears them should dimly feel—though of course he cannot put it into words—that he is hearing saga. Let him be thrilled—preferably ‘out of school’—by the ‘Deeds that won the Empire’; but the less we mix this up with his ‘history lessons’ or mistake it for a serious analysis—worse still,”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about ‘isms’ and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“Some buy pictures because the walls ‘look so bare without them’; and after the pictures have been in the house for a week they become practically invisible to them. But there are a few who feed on a great picture for years.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others’ Eyes

“None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“good writing, sincerity, of itself, never taught anyone to write well. It is a moral virtue, not a literary talent.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history—the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. . . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“Hence it is irrelevant whether the mood expressed in a poem was truly and historically the poet’s own or one that he also had imagined. What matters is his power to make us live it. I”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“The true aim of literary studies is to lift the student out of his provincialism by making him ‘the spectator’, if not of all, yet of much, ‘time and existence’. The student, or even the schoolboy, who has been brought by good (and therefore mutually disagreeing) teachers to meet the past where alone the past still lives, is taken out of the narrowness of his own age and class into a more public world.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“As Lewis himself explained, “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. . . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“When one has read a book, I think there is nothing so nice as discussing it with some one else—even though it sometimes produces rather fierce arguments.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of information.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes