C.S. Lewis Quotes: 142

• Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .

  The Four Loves

• You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

• Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

• I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

• A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

• If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

• The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

• Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

  The Four Loves

• Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.

• I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

• 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.

• To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

• We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

• A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

  The Problem of Pain

• There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

• Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

• Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

  The Silver Chair

• God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.

• Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...

• Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

• 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.

• I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.

  The Silver Chair

• I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

• You can make anything by writing.

• The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.

• He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

• What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.

• I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

• No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

  A Grief Observed

• The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

• God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

• I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?

• If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

• Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

• We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

• She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.

  The Screwtape Letters

• The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.

• And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

  Mere Christianity

• My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

  Mere Christianity

• You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

• It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.

• The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

• You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,"said the Lion.

  The Silver Chair

• I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!

  The Last Battle

• The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.

• Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.

  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

• We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

• It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.

  The Silver Chair

• Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.

  Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

• There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

  The Great Divorce

• You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,"said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.

  Prince Caspian

• Adventures are never fun while you're having them.

  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

• If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it.

• Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted---i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk---don't keep on looking at it.

  The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume lll: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963

• You can't know, you can only believe - or not.

• Do not dare not to dare.

  The Horse and His Boy

• I was with book, as a woman is with child.

  Till We Have Faces

• For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.

  The Problem of Pain

• If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

  Mere Christianity

• Nothing is yet in its true form.

• A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

  Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

• I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

• [God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.

  The Screwtape Letters

• He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

• Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.

  The Joyful Christian

• 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.

• Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!

  The Magician's Nephew

• Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

  The Problem of Pain

• There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

• In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.

• The death of a beloved is an amputation.

  A Grief Observed

• Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

  Mere Christianity

• In our world,"said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.

  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

• I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

• All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.

  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

• I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

  The Four Loves

• God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.

  Mere Christianity

• Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

  Mere Christianity

• I seemed to hear God saying, "Put down your gun and we'll talk.

• Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

• Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

  Miracles

• When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.

  The Horse and His Boy

• We are what we believe we are!

• The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.

  The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis

• He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.

  The Weight of Glory

• Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.

• 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.

  The Chronicles of Narnia

• Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

  A Grief Observed

• Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!

  The Horse and His Boy

• There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.

  That Hideous Strength

• You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.

  The Magician's Nephew

• My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

  A Grief Observed

• In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.

  The Four Loves

• Aslan: You doubt your value. Don't run from who you are.

  Prince Caspian

• And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.

  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

• What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?

  A Grief Observed

• When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.

• We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely

• We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.

  The Problem of Pain

• Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see.

  Screwtape Letters

• The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own.

• Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?

  The Four Loves

• What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects--with their Christianity latent.

• I wish I had never been born,"she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness,"said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment...

  The Great Divorce

• Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.

  A Grief Observed

• The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)...

• At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

  The Weight of Glory

• I have come,"said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.

  The Silver Chair

• [The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

• I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.

  Till We Have Faces

• They call him Aslan in That Place,"said Eustace."What a curious name!" "Not half so curious as himself,"said Eustace solemnly.

  The Chronicles of Narnia

• Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.

  Perelandra

• …the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects, we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

  Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

• In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

• God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

• There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

  The Screwtape Letters

• Then Hwin, though shaking all over, gave a strange little neigh and trotted across to the Lion. "Please,"she said, "you're so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I'd sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.

  The Horse and His Boy

• Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.

• An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else.

  The Abolition of Man

• Do you think I care if Aslan doomes me to death?” said the King. “That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.

  The Last Battle

• Here the whole world (stars, water, air,And field, and forest, as they wereReflected in a single mind)Like cast off clothes was left behindIn ashes, yet with hopes that she,Re-born from holy poverty,In lenten lands, hereafter mayResume them on her Easter Day."(Epitaph for Joy Davidman)

• I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

  A Grief Observed

• The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.

• 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.

  Mere Christianity

• As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.

  The Four Loves

• Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.

• Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.

  The Four Loves

• You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

  The Abolition of Man

• For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.

  The Abolition of Man

• But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on"concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

• If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

• Something of God... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.

• We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.

  Mere Christianity

• By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

  The Abolition of Man

• Even if there were pains in Heaven, all who understand would desire them.

  The Problem of Pain

• Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

• Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature.

  Mere Christianity

• Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

• the difference between the old and the new education being) in a word, the old was a kind of propagation - men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

  The Abolition of Man

• Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector.

  A Grief Observed

• Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.

• A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.