C. S. Lewis Quotes About Age

• Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia, Book 2)”, p.7, HarperCollins UK

• 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 and beyond.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Reading, Age

• Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.

  C. S. Lewis

  Age, Youth, Surface

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “That Hideous Strength”, p.19, Simon and Schuster

• 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.

  C. S. Lewis

  Cutting, Errors, Race

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Paved with Good Intentions: A Demon’s Road Map to Your Soul”, p.9, Harper Collins

• The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

  C. S. Lewis

  Adversity, Years, Weather

• Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

  C. S. Lewis

  Birthday, Talking, Age

• What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Writing, Fire

• As for wrinkles--Pshaw! Why shouldn't we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wrinkles, Long, Age

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Letters to an American Lady”, p.79, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Passion, Night, Years

• A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Errors, Age

• Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.

  C. S. Lewis

  Fashion, Acceptance, Intellectual

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.221, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline , and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wise, Reality, Men

• Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life.

  C. S. Lewis

  Autumn, Age, Aging

• When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing.

  C. S. Lewis

  Age, Addresses, Taste

• Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mistake, Book, Mean

• How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

  C. S. Lewis

  Age, Aging, Incessant

• At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Class, Giving, Age

• Last year, when he had been staying with the Pevensies, he had managed to hear them all talking of Narnia and he loved teasing them about it. He thought of course that they were making it all up; and as he was far too stupid to make anything up himself, he did not approve of that.

  C. S. Lewis

  Love, Stupid, Talking

  C. S. Lewis (2010). “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, p.10, HarperCollins UK

• Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mother, Taken, Heart

• It is no disparagement to the garden to say it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns...It will remain a garden only if someone does all these things to it...If you want to see the difference between [the garden's] contribution and the gardener's, put the commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes rakes, shears, and a packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy, and fecundity beside dead, steril things. Just so, our 'decency and common sense' show grey and deathlike beside the geniality of love.

  C. S. Lewis

  Love, Weed, Cutting

• My son, by all means desist from kicking the venerable and enlightened Vizier: for as a costly jewel retains its value even if hidden in a dung-hill, so old age and discretion are to be respected even in the vile persons of our subjects. Desist therefore, and tell us what you desire and propose.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mean, Son, Jewels

  C.S.Lewis (2016). “The Chronicles of Narnia Vol V: The Horse and his Boy”, p.81, ENRICH CULTURE GROUP LIMITED

• If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Reading, Age

• But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves.

  C. S. Lewis

  Age, Limits, Certain

• 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.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Book, Writing

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature”, p.58, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The Guide sang:
  The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought,
  And fools crying,
  Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun!
  The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run
  Faster for ever,
  The old age is done,
  We have new lights and see without the sun.
  (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea,
  Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Art, Light

  "The Pilgrim's Regress". Book by C. S. Lewis, pp. 186-187, 1933.

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