C. S. Lewis Quotes

Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier could give some advice.

Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.

A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.

To love is to be vulnerable.

One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

It's like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.

Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other.

Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.

Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also.

this is a book about something

This is the land of Narnia,' said the Faun, 'where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea.

When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over

Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want

It's always winter but it's never Christmas.

Here at last is the thing I was made for.

We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely

Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here's the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it.

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.

Laziness means more work in the long run.

To be ignorant and simple now-not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground-would be to throw down our weapons and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart.

Why must holy places be dark places?

Grief. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.

You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God.

Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.

No thanks," said Digory, "I don't know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I'd rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven.

You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.

I wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.

She remembered, as every sensible person does, that you should never never shut yourself up in a wardrobe.

The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.

A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food.

The doors of hell are locked from the inside!

And I was the Lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

... believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him 'good' and worshipping him is a still greater danger... The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of scripture is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissable.

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.

No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.

If there is equality it is in His love, not in us.

You die and die and then you are beyond death.

They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?

When you have reached your own room, be kind to those Who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.

At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget[...]that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.