C. S. Lewis Quotes About Values

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  Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

  C. S. Lewis

  Education, Clever, Live Life

• 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

• Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest upon reciprocity.

  C. S. Lewis

  Love Is, Doe, Reciprocity

• A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional...values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Religion, Atheism

• You asked for a loving God: you have one... The consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes.

  C. S. Lewis

  Dog, Sex, Children

• 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

• Aslan: You doubt your value. Don't run from who you are.

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Doubt, Narnia

• The value of the individual does not lie in him. He receives it by union with Christ.

  C. S. Lewis

  Lying, Doe, Unions

  C. S. Lewis (1984). “The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis”, p.215, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

  C. S. Lewis

  Ideas, Slavery, Belief

  C. S. LEWIS (1947). “THE ABOLITION OF MAN”

• The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike...Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.

  C. S. Lewis

  Law, Ideas, Atheism

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.36, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Vanity is really the least bad and most pardonable sort. The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a childlike and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you. You are in fact still human.

  C. S. Lewis

  Humble, Vanity, People

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.110, HarperCollins UK

• The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

  C. S. Lewis

  Veils, Rich, Myth

  "On Stories and Other Essays on Literature". Book by C. S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper, "Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings", p. 90, 1982.

• The value of the Old Testament may be dependant on what seems its imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way-to find the Word in it...to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God's gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works.

  C. S. Lewis

  Bible, Biblical, Self

• The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

  C. S. Lewis

  Philosophy, Feelings, Given

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Christian Reflections”, p.50, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind.

  C. S. Lewis

  Writing, Mind, Moral

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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

• Very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Thinking, People, Modern

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.69, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wise, Horse, Children

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “Image and Imagination”, p.108, Cambridge University Press

• 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

• Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Lying, Animal

• The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about moral values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation.

  C. S. Lewis

  Ethos, Law, Ideas

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Christian Reflections”, p.100, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Trying, Done

• Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.

  C. S. Lewis

  Skills, Judging, Results

  "A Preface to Paradise Lost". Book by C. S. Lewis. Chapter 2: "Is Criticism Possible?", 1942.

• The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.

  C. S. Lewis

  Color, Sky, Mind

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