C. S. Lewis Quotes About Assumption

• Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to 'cure' it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Trying, Philosopher

• The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Boys, Thinking, Years

• [The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Decay, Logic

• 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the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date.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

• The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Past, Guiding Principles

• You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own'. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to him employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which h allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

  C. S. Lewis

  Religious, Feelings, Doubt

• 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. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Hero, Long

• Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Memories, Five Senses, Minorities

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.31, Faber & Faber

• A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed.

  C. S. Lewis

  Recovery, Men, Essentials

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