An Experiment in Criticism: reading currently

The incipient level is thus a place where you can eat your cake and have it, where you can be heroic without danger and generous without expense.

Woe to me if I do not seek out vulgarity, superficiality, and false sentiment, and expose them wherever they lie hidden. A sincere inquisitor or a sincere witch-finder can hardly do his chosen work with mildness.

These dethronements are a great waste of energy. Their acrimony produces heat at the expense of light.

No poem will give up its secret to a reader who enters it regarding the poet as a potential deceiver, and determined not to be taken in. We must risk being taken in, if we are to get anything.

'Using' is inferior to ' reception ' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.

...who seeks in an author the enlargement of his mental being and who seeks only the enlargement of his self-esteem.

The dying seldom make magnificent last speeches. And we who watch them die do not, I think, behave very like the minor characters in a tragic death-scene.

Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. The eight-year-old despises the six-year-old and rejoices to be getting such a big boy ; the schoolboy is very determined not to be a child, and the freshman not to be a schoolboy. If we are resolved to eradicate, without examining them on their merits, all the traits of our youth, we might begin with this-with youth's characteristic chronological snobbery. And what then would become of the criticism which attaches so much importance to being adult and instils a fear and shame of any enjoyment we can share with the very young?

The Teddy-bear exists in order that the child may endow it with imaginary life and personality and enter into a quasi-social relationship with it. That is what 'playing with it ' means. The better this activity succeeds the less the actual appearance of the object will matter.

"When the young person in question is an agnostic whose ancestors were Puritans, you get a very regrettable state of mind. The Puritan conscience works on without the Puritan theology-like millstones grinding nothing ; like digestive juices working on an empty stomach and producing ulcers."

An Experiment in Criticism, C S Lewis