C. S. Lewis Quotes

God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity ... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him.

Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don't we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive -- who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture -- almost the précis -- we've made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact.

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

But the most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.

A man can't be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it.

The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

It certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

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

When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing.

The enemy will not see you vanish into God's company without an effort to reclaim you.

Every object you see before you at this moment -the walls, ceiling, and furniture, the book, your own washed hands and cut fingernails, bears witness to the colonization of Nature of Reason.

Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.

All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it, tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.'

The devil loves 'curing' a small fault by giving you a great one.

The only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. Our charities should pinch and hamper us. If we live at the same level of affluence as other people who have our level of income, we are probably giving away too little.

I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.

Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it.

A clever arrangement of bad eggs will never make a good omelet.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.

Very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.

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.

Nothing is really ours until we share it.

Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.

Love is the great conqueror of lust.

The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden-that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

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.

When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.

But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn’t yet, or used to be Human once and isn’t now, or ought to be Human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.

Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.

Catch {a man} at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, "By jove, I'm being humble," and almost immediately pride - pride at his own humility - will appear.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.

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

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.

You can't really study people; you can only get to know them.

My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members." --about the only statement i agree with in this book

But do you really mean, Sir," said Peter, "that there could be other worlds-all over the place, just round the corner-like that?" "Nothing is more probable," said the Profesor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, "I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.

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

There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was 'the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.'

I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow - getting into my morning bath is usually one of them - that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.

And men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins

Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one.

The true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.

The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right.

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.

Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people

The longest way round is the shortest way home