C. S. Lewis Quotes

The Opposite of Love is not hate, but power

But as long as you know you're nobody special, you'll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another.

Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.

Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life.

Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.

Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves, in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers - a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians - a Church that can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should.

It is because they have no Oyarsa,' said one of the pupils. It is because everyone of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,' said Augray.

Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.

There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.

Monarchy can easily be "debunked," but watch the faces, mark well the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film stars instead: For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

Where I come from, they don't think much of men who are bossed about by their wives.

Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.

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.

Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.

The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

Giving to the poor is an essential part of Christian morality.

It is not enough to want to get rid of one’s sins, we also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins.

That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.

If Christianity is only one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance.

The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.

Joy bursts in our lives when we go about doing the good at hand and not trying to manipulate things and times to achieve joy.

In the truest sense, Christian pilgrims have the best of both worlds. We have joy whenever this world reminds us of the next, and we take solace whenever it does not.

The value of the Old Testament may be dependant on what seems its imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way-to find the Word in it...to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God's gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works.

Selfishness has never been admired.

The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.

This moment contains all moments.

All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or child.

[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.

In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.

Cobbles and kettledrums! ...I hope this madness isn't going to end in a moonlit climb and broken necks.

Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.

Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. ... We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.

We may think God wants actions of a certain kind, but God wants people of a certain kind.

It is often little things that are hardest to stand.

That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top, and then it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down.

[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.

You ask ‘for what’ God wants you. Isn’t the primary answer that He wants you. We’re not told that the lost sheep was sought out for anything except itself [Matthew 18:12-14; Luke 15:3-7]. Of course, He may have a special job for you: and the certain job is that of becoming more and more His.

Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.

If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

You'll never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking what sort of impression you make.

I do not expect old heads on young shoulders.

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