Welcome to our collection of quotes by C. S. Lewis. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) was a British writer and lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Oxford University (Magdalen College, 1925–1954) and Cambridge University (Magdalene College, 1954–1963). He is best known for his works of fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.
Lewis and fellow novelist J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends. They both served on the English faculty at Oxford University and were active in the informal Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. According to Lewis's 1955 memoir Surprised by Joy, he was baptised in the Church of Ireland, but fell away from his faith during adolescence. Lewis returned to Anglicanism at the age of 32, owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, and he became an "ordinary layman of the Church of England". Lewis's faith profoundly affected his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.
Lewis wrote more than 30 books which have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies. The books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have sold the most and have been popularised on stage, TV, radio, and cinema. His philosophical writings are widely cited by Christian apologists from many denominations.
In 1956, Lewis married American writer Joy Davidman; she died of cancer four years later at the age of 45. Lewis died on 22 November 1963 from kidney failure, one week before his 65th birthday. In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis was honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say "My tooth is aching” than to say "My heart is broken.
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth.
Longer Version:
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
Preparing for Easter is a concise, handy companion for the faithful of all Christian traditions and the curious to help them deepen their knowledge and consideration of this holy season.
God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
If you do one good deed, your reward is to be set to do another and harder and better one.
There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
The naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one's own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than Nature exists.
It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things; but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.
We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness.
For the critics who think Chesterton frivolous or 'paradoxical' I have to work hard to feel even pity; sympathy is out of the question.
We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words -- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.
Longer Version:
Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. Humility is thinking more of others.
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.
In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.
I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, of this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly.
The promise, made when I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love.
Longer Version:
The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.
Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.
Longer Version:
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the old Christian rule is, Either marriage, with completely faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.
Nobody who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any business to talk about 'misery.'
If conversion makes no improvements in a man's outward actions then I think his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.
I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't.
The mouse is a fair treat but this one would talk the hind legs off a donkey.
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.
I'd sooner live among people who don't cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards.
Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.
Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.
To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable in you.
Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed.
Kids like us don't often have the chance of meeting a great warrior like you. Would you have a little fencing match with me? It would be frightfully decent.
He who has not forgiven an enemy has never yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.
People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
Before God closed in on me, I was offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. But I feel my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair.
Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.
By gum,' said Digory, 'Don't I just wish I was big enough to punch your head!
Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.
I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it.
God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
Holiness is irresistible. If even 10% of the world's population had it the whole world would be converted and happy before the year's end.
Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again.
God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?
Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan.
Girls aren't very good at keeping maps in their brains, said Edmund, That's because we've got something in them, replied Lucy.
When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love them.
Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?
Agnostics talk cheerfully of man's search for God but they might as well talk about the mouse's search for the cat.
I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer.
A man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.
Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.
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.
A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon.
The Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.
And that's why, gentleman, if your little girl doesn't come up to scratch, it will be our painful duty to cut all your throats. Merely in a way of business, as you might say, and no offense, I hope.
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.
Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.
The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.
The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.
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.
Certainly, Lu. Whatever you like,' said Peter unexpectedly. This was encouraging, but as Peter instantly rolled round and went to sleep again it wasn't much use.
All the time the joke is that the word mine in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Satan or God will say mine of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.
That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.
We have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.
By repenting, one acknowledges them as sins-therefore not to be repeated.
On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, ... they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.
It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.
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.
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.
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.
What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.
His face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say.
The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth -- the very thing the whole story has been about.
There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.
Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.
