C. S. Lewis Quotes

I have seen something like it happen in battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped out cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face - friends for a moment - and then at once enemies again and forever.

Well, whatever they say, you don't feel like ghosts.

Regarding the debate about faith and works: It's like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most important.

I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love others less.

I am suffering incessant temptations to uncharitable thoughts at present; one of those black moods in which nearly all one's friends seem to be selfish or even false. And how terrible that there should be even a kind of pleasure in thinking evil.

You and I who still enjoy fairy tales have less reason to wish actual childhood back. We have kept its pleasures and added some grown-up ones as well.

In our adversity, God shouts to us.

'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.

God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.

You must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give.

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost or you wouldn't have come where you now are.

The worst of sleeping out of doors is that you wake up so dreadfully early. And when you wake up you have to get up because the ground is so hard you are uncomfortable. And it makes matters worse if there is nothing but apples for breakfast and you have had nothing but apples for supper the night before.

It is a happy moment when our desire crosses with the will of Heavenly Father.

I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.

So many things--nay every real thing--is good if only it will be humble and ordinate.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

I know the two great commandments, and I'd better get on with them.

We know nothing of religion here: we only think of Christ.

Nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee.

Sometimes fairy stories may say best what's to be said.

Repentance is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose; it is simply a description of what going back is like.

The more we get what we now call 'ourselves' out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.

The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose him as an alternative to hell.

It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself-to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed.

Believe in God like you believe in the sunrise. Not because you can see it, but because you can see all it touches.

Is any pleasure on Earth as great as a circle of Christian friends?

An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.

The Glory of God, and, as our only means of glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life.

If you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ's body...every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who along can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be a odd way of getting him to do more work.

The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.

But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.

We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

He thinks great folly, child,' said Aslan. "This world is bursting with life for these few days because the song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air and rumbles in the ground. It will not be so for long. But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh, Adam's son, how cleverly you defend yourself against all that might do you good!

Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.

The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.

The 'frankness' of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them.

Remember He is the artist and you are the picture. You can’t see it, you can't see your true self. So quietly submit to be painted.

When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

You people have no imagination!

If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?