C. S. Lewis Quotes About Imagination

• Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

  C. S. Lewis

  Order, Imagination, Literature

• We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Blessed, Reality

• No, I don’t wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.

  C. S. Lewis

  Divorce, Orange, Imagination

• The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens - at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.

  C. S. Lewis

  Heart, Osiris, Order

• We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows.

  C. S. Lewis

  Life, Heart, Eye

• For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

  C. S. Lewis

  Imagination, Causes, Reason

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “Selected Literary Essays”, p.265, Cambridge University Press

• The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.

  C. S. Lewis

  Heart, Imagination, Heaven

  C. S. Lewis (1984). “The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis”, p.314, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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

• One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Errors, Sea

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Image and Imagination”, p.14, Harper Collins

• Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature-not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant....As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden.

  C. S. Lewis

  Happiness, Brother, Real

  C. S. Lewis (1966). “Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which 'took these things into account' was not faith but imagination.

  C. S. Lewis

  Blow, House Of Cards, Imagination

  C.S. Lewis (2014). “A Grief Observed Readers' Edition: With contributions from Hilary Mantel, Jessica Martin, Jenna Bailey, Rowan Williams, Kate Saunders, Francis Spufford and Maureen Freely”, p.21, Faber & Faber

• No one can say 'He jests at scars who never felt a wound' for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am that man.

  C. S. Lewis

  Pain, Men, Imagination

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “The Problem of Pain”, p.12, Harper Collins

• The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.

  C. S. Lewis

  Imagination, Suggestions, Hints

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature”, p.38, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• You people have no imagination!

  C. S. Lewis

  People, Imagination

  "Fictional character: Reepicheep". "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian", 2008.

You May Also Like:

J. R. R. Tolkien

Joy Davidman

Lewis Carroll

Gilbert K. Chesterton

J. K. Rowling

Douglas Gresham

Georgie Henley