C. S. Lewis Quotes

The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their Mother and from the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far the East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus.

The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard.

Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.

I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.

Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.

Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices.

Aslan's instructions always work; there are no exceptions.

Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already

It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.

One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons--marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

but who can feel ugly, when their heart feels joy

All right, beautiful. You've got me tied down to this stone table, and there's a knife in your hand that says you get to rule Narnia for another hundred years. So maybe I die, and winter goes on. Maybe the hunger and the darkness and the fear never end. But as long as the children believe in me, I know that Aslan will live again. I, the Great Lion, Son of The Emperor Over The Sea, will live again and -- aaaaauugh!!

I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? WEll, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments).

Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of lucifer.... An instrument strung, but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician

Our souls demand Purgatory, don't they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into joy? Should we not reply, With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleansed first. It may hurt, you know-even so, sir.

If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all

The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power -- it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.

I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside of their special subject.

It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It's not the sort of comfort they supply there.

I cannot speak for the way God deals with others; I only know how he deals with me personally.

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.

If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit.

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, "Here comes one who will augment our loves." For in this love "to divide is not to take away.

I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there'd be no difficulty.

But I remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intensely silent under old great trees

For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God has made the world- that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colors and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His head' as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.

Love as distinct from "being in love" is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.

It is very true. But even a traitor may mend. I have known one that did.

Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.

Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness.

Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women.

Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.

Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question "What on earth is he up to now?" will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.

Badness is only spoiled goodness.

A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.

we follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus-not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in his eyes than in ours.

If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.

Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

Homemaking is surely in reality the most important work in the world.

If He who in Himself can lack nothing, chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness; was it an elf in the blood? Or a bird in the brain? Or even part of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud, uplifted wave of a journeying angels transit over and through my heart?

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s (God’s) ground…He [God] made the pleasure: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He [God] has forbidden.