C. S. Lewis Quotes About Art

• Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Truth, Creativity

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Virtue and Vice: A Dictionary of the Good Life”, p.12, Harper Collins

• There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Taken, Mean

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Christian Reflections”, p.11, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• For they (art and music) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

  C. S. Lewis

  Country, Art, Flower

• Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

  C. S. Lewis

  Friendship, Best Friend, Relationship

• I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Thinking, People

• There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Gnats, Civilization

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Christian Reflections”, p.11, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• A man whose life has been transformed by Christ cannot help but have his worldview show through.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Men, Helping

• The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Demand, Way

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “An Experiment in Criticism”, p.19, Cambridge University Press

• I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Philosophy, Men

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.83, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Reflection, Trying

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Christian Reflections”, p.9, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Children, Mean

  "Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold". Book by C. S. Lewis, 1956.

• We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of 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

  Art, Order, Looks

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “An Experiment in Criticism”, p.19, Cambridge University Press

• As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Thinking, Imagination

• We are...a Divine work of art, something that God is making...something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Character, Divine

• Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wisdom, Art, Teach

• No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Philosophy, Self

• Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Holding On, Reason

  C. S. Lewis (1984). “The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis”, p.76, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Men, Understanding

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Out of the Silent Planet”, p.130, Simon and Schuster

• The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mother, Art, Lust

• A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Poetry, Literature

• I am perfectly convinced that whatever the gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear they are not that sort of thing....Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has based any doctrine on it. And the act of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is purely a modern art.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Dust, Details

• To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Excellence, Firsts

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “Selected Literary Essays”, p.103, Cambridge University Press

• Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Enjoyed, Captives

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature”, p.144, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Religious, Art

• Have you not seen that in our days
  Of any whose story, song or art
  Delights us, our sincerest praise
  Means, when all's said, 'You break my heart?

  C. S. Lewis

  Song, Art, Mean

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “Poems”, p.149, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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