C.S Lewis was an Oxford and Cambridge scholar, a prolific writer, poet, classicist, philosopher, and Christian. He wrote more than 20 books in his time the most popular of which is, The Chronicles Of Narnia and Mere Christianity. While C.S Lewis was a prolific writer, Lewis was also an insatiable reader. C.S Lewis spent his whole life as a reader, and though he was a professor, he never stopped learning. C.S Lewis knew the value and importance of reading a good book. Solely for the sake of the book. He thought you should read good books because they were good and not because they would give you a leg up on the other guy. In the quotes below I hope that you too can fall in love with reading and begin to read good books simply because they are good and you like them.
1. ReReading Books
“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”
― C.S. Lewis
2. Old Book Sandwich
“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”
― C.S. Lewis
3. Read More Than Once
“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
― C.S. Lewis
4. Eat While You Read
“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
― C.S. Lewis
5. Fairies and old men
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis
6. Drink while you read
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis
7. be a man of many books
“I am a product […of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.”
― C.S. Lewis
8. reading is dangerous
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
9. don't neglect the past
“If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.”
― C.S. Lewis
10. become more than yourself
“But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
― C.S. Lewis
Love these quotes!