C. S. Lewis Quotes

While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend.

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

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.

The surest way of spoiling a pleasure [is] to start examining your satisfaction.

Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might suppose.

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

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.

When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary

To move with the times is, of course, to go where all times go.

And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back--if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.

And the seriousness with which the other party takes my words always raises the doubt whether I have taken them seriously enough myself.

I came alive when I started loving you.

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards obeying the others.

Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners.

Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere "opiate of the people" have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.

Could one start a Stagnation Party-which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?

God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.

What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?'

Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease?

‎"Don't bother too much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behavior

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds’ song and the frosty sunrise.

Many people think their prayers are never answered because it is the answered ones they forget.

Fancy sleeping on air. I wonder if anyone's done it before. I don't suppose they have. Oh, bother—-Scrubb probably has!

No one can teach riding so well as a horse.

The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary.

Joy is the serious business of heaven.

If you never take risks, you'll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.

We come to Scripture not to learn a subject but to steep ourselves in a person.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

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

Digory never spoke on the way back, and the others were shy of speaking to him. He was very sad and he wasn't even sure all the time that he had done the right thing; but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan's eyes he became sure.

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.

Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.

If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain.

It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men.

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ.

The Calormens have dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-colored turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people. They bowed most politely to Caspian and paid him long compliments all about the fountains of prosperity irrigating the gardens of prudence and virtue --and things like that-- but of course what they wanted was the money they had paid.

Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed.