C. S. Lewis Quotes

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them.

Once in our world, a Stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.

All joy... emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.

We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms.

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process. It needs not a map, but a history, and if I don't stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there's no reason why I should ever stop.

Sexual appetite, like any other appetite, grows by indulgence

The only way to drive out bad culture is to create good culture. We need to recognize that artistic talent is a gift from the Lord - and that developing those talents is the only way to create good culture.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.

The full acting out of the self's surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination

You can make anything by writing.

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.

Forgiveness does not mean excusing.

The longer we stay in Hell, the more we become attached to it.

To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death -- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.

If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.

Peter, High King of Narnia," said Aslan. "Shut the Door.

For the past twenty years you and I have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.

As St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only "as harmless as doves," but also "as wise as serpents." He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head.

All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning...Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.

We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.

I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic...In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. 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.

You're a mere chick. I remember you when you were a egg. Don't come trying to teach me, sir. Crabs and crumpets!

Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

I pray because I can't help myself.

According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.

If you don't listen to theology, that won't mean you have no ideas about God, it will mean you have a lot of wrong ones.

Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.

The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds him liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.

It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.

As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.

Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.

We have not long to live in any event. Let us spend what is left in seeking the unpeopled world behind the sunrise.

...this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.

You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred - like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.

When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.

That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal sufferring, "No future bliss can make up for it" not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.

God is not a static thing...but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.

A man's physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.

You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.

It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' [everything]. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.

Morality or duty never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.

The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.

We read to know we are not alone.