C. S. Lewis Quotes About Critics

• You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Life, Spiritual

• No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Cities, Together

  C. S. Lewis (1980). “Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

  C. S. Lewis

  Courage, Army, Bravery

  In Cyril Connolly 'The Unquiet Grave' (1944) ch. 31

• Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.

  C. S. Lewis

  Childhood, Adults, Approval

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories”, p.37, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.

  C. S. Lewis

  Adults, Approval, Treats

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories”, p.37, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. it does involve the belief that god loves man and for his sake became man and died.

  C. S. Lewis

  God, Faith, Christian

  C. S. Lewis (1996). “Miracles: A Preliminary Study”, Touchstone Books

• The search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where God wants him to be a pupil. What he wants from the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise- does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.

  C. S. Lewis

  Attitude, Humble, Men

• All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job...And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legends or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I've read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff.

  C. S. Lewis

  Bible, Jobs, Thinking

• The Intelligentsia (scientists apart) are losing all touch with, and all influence over, nearly the whole human race. Our most esteemed poets and critics are read by our most esteemed critics and poets (who don't usually like them much) and nobody else takes any notice. An increasing number of highly literate people simply ignore what the 'Highbrows' are doing. It says nothing to them. The Highbrows in return ignore and insult them.

  C. S. Lewis

  Race, Numbers, America

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.276, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.

  C. S. Lewis

  Order, Two, Mind

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.24, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• If we are any good we must always be working towards the moment at which our Pupils are fit to become our Critics & Rivals

  C. S. Lewis

  Rivals, Fit, Moments

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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