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C. S. Lewis Quotes about Art

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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

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.

Art, Reflection, Trying

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

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

Art, Men, Helping

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.

Art, Taken, Mean

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

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.

Art, Thinking, People

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

Art, Demand, Way

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

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.

Country, Art, Flower

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.

Art, Truth, Creativity

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

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.

Art, Children, Mean

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

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.

Art, Dust, Details

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.

Art, Philosophy, Men

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

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.

Art, Gnats, Civilization

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

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.

Art, Thinking, Imagination

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.

Art, Holding On, Reason

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

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.

Art, Character, Divine

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.

Art, Order, Looks

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

Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.

Wisdom, Art, Teach

The Guide sang: The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, And fools crying, Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun! The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run Faster for ever, The old age is done, We have new lights and see without the sun. (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

Running, Art, Light

"The Pilgrim's Regress". Book by C. S. Lewis, pp. 186-187, 1933.

The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.

Art, Strong, Desire

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

Art, Excellence, Firsts

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

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.

Christian, Religious, Art

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

Art, Philosophy, Self

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?

Song, Art, Mean

C. S. Lewis (2002). “Poems”, p.149, 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.

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.

Mother, Art, Lust

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.

Art, Enjoyed, Captives

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

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