C. S. Lewis Quotes

We live in our myths, we only endure reality.

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

(I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.

The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

The more real things get, the more like myths they become.

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.

Facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie.

You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

Myth is the nothing that is all.

Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he knows nothing but what has passed under his own eyes.

I have to tell it again and again: I have no doctrine. I only point out something. I point out reality, I point out something in reality which has not or too little been seen. I take him who listens to me at his hand and lead him to the window. I push open the window and point outside. I have no doctrine, I carry on a dialogue.

In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

That which is cannot be true.

There are many levels of truth.

Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

From earliest times, humans - explorers and thinkers - have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we've done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Facts are many, but the truth is one.

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.