C. S. Lewis Quotes

Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.

The stamp of the Saint is that he can waive his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus.

For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being.

We have not, in fact, proved that science excludes miracles: we have only proved that the question of miracles, like innumerable other questions, excludes laboratory treatment.

Much is expected from those to whom much is given.

If things are real, they're there all the time.

The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth-- the very thing the whole story has been about.

When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only person in the world.

Well!' said Puddleglum, rubbing his hands. 'This is just what I needed. If these chaps don't teach me to take a serious view of life, I don't know what will.

I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.... I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

The discomfiture we feel may be our most accurate human sensation; reminding us we are not quite "at home" here.

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.

Humour is...the all-consoling and...the all-excusing, grace of life.

The Christian "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection

[Something] does not rise to the dignity of error.

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.

You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to 'know of the doctrine'.

In your world, I have another name. You should know me by it.

What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.

Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'.

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

In my experience, it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate the people who 'happen to be there.' Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.

The real moon,if you could reach it and survive it, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else...no man would find an abiding strangness on the moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.

The bolt of Tash falls from above!' 'Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway?

We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all."

God is love, and that love works through men-especially through the whole community of Christians.

I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse... Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil.

I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself.

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.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

How little people know who think that holiness is dull... When one meets the real thing, it's irresistible!

I don't want to hold you hand!

Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.

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

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

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 value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.

Materialism is in fact no protection. Those who seek it in that hope (they are not a negligible class) will be disappointed. The thing you fear is impossible. Well and good. Can you therefore cease to fear it? Not here and now. And what then? If you must see ghosts, it is better not to disbelieve in them.

Sainthood lies in the habit of referring the smallest actions to God.

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.

A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility.

I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

Man is to be understood only in his relationship to God.