The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teachin… - C. S. Lewis
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The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, '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.'
A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) was an Irish author, scholar of medieval literature, and Christian apologist. He is best known for his essays on Christianity and for the children's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, John S. Murray (Public domain / CC0)
Also Known As
Pen Names:
N. W. Clerk
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Clive Hamilton
Birth Name:
Clive Staples Lewis
Alternative Names:
CS Lewis
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C.S. Lewis
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Clive Lewis
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Nat Whilk
All that we call human history — money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery — [is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
But very quickly they all became grave again: for, as you know, there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
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