C. S. Lewis Quotes

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

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

A myth is a lie that conveys a truth.

Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.

Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next.

You can't lay down any pattern for God. There are many different ways of bringing people into his Kingdom, even some ways that I specially dislike! I have therefore learned to be cautious in my judgment.

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self changed into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One's most private wishes, one's point of view, are the things that have to be changed.

A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.

Once when I had remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, "Yes. But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs.

Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.

You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.

Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.

A man who first tried to guess 'what the public wants,' and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave

The Christian idea of 'putting on Christ' is the whole of Christianity.

Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.

Don't worry. If you really want to, you will Whether you'll like it when you do is another question.

He who has not forgiven an enemy has never yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.

When you go to church you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends.

You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.

It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been "had for a sucker" by any number of imposters but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need.

Joy is the serious business of heaven. Our merriment must be between people who take each other seriously.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.

Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.

It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

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.

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

The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time.

He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of Life He has - by what I call 'good infection'. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

We have to be continually reminded of what we believe.

Some journeys take us far from home. Some adventures lead us to our destiny.

Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. (And) There is no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Righ and Wrong are.

Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.

When he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realized that while his lips had been saying 'Oh Lord, make me chaste,' his heart had been secretly adding, 'But please don't do it just yet.

There have been men before who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself, as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

Humility is self-forgetfulness.

The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.

We long for more and God's promise is that there is more awaiting us. More to delight us than we will ever exhaust.

For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.

Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles....He's our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.