C. S. Lewis Quotes

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.

The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other...

With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.

Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson.

The death of a beloved is an amputation.

There is no use saying you chose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up.

You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage but He is building a palace. He intends to come & live in it Himself

On the back of Satan's neck is a nail scarred footprint.

Goodness is, so to speak, itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.

I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.

Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends - comrades - do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed.

You do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but you have lost love because you never attempted obedience.

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling action after action had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an harrow to the string then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead through to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once now so many culs de sac.

If I had really cared as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came- I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me, now it matters and I find I didn't.

You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter.

You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.

Many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and... God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again

I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.

Those who put themselves in His hands will become perfect, as He is perfect- perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, health, and immortality. The change will not be completed in this life, for death is an important part of the treatment. How far the change will have gone before death in any particular Christian is uncertain.

Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.

Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection - if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.

It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory

It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

To be in love involves the most irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness.

If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.

Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head, but don't be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud, one is safe from the worst form of pride.

Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!

The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: "I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely.

The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose.

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.

In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people's, we do not accept them easily enough.

What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week.

Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.

In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.

The value of the individual does not lie in him. He receives it by union with Christ.