C. S. Lewis Quotes

We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may "conquer" them.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

Many things complicated by nature are restored by reason.

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals.

Is not the history of real civilization the slow and gradual emancipation of the intellect, of the judgment, from the mastery of passion? Is not that man civilized whose reason sits the crowned monarch of his brain - whose passions are his servants?

Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life's vast flock of wild irrationalities.

Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder.

Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason.

Between craft and credulity, the voice of reason is stifled.

The greatest genius is never so great as when it is chastised and subdued by the highest reason.

Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed.

The desire to order other people around and make them conform to one own's vision takes many forms.

In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as brazilwood and pepper, which added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity... From these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travelers tales.

Education and study, and the favors of the muses, confer no greater benefit on those that seek them than these humanizing and civilizing lessons, which teach our natural qualities to submit to the limitations prescribed by reason, and to avoid the wildness of extremes.

Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

What is it that would make a creature as fierce, majestic and powerful as a lion is, subject itself to the intimidation of a man a whip and a chair? The lion has been taught to forget what it is.

He foresaw that she would be very much more useful to him in the character of a free woman.

Those walls and bars are there for a reason,” said Crake. “Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.” “Them?” “Nature and God.” “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy. “I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.

I think: the powers like to talk about "freedom" in order to wash the population's brains.