763 Inspiring Quotes by C. S. Lewis

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary.

You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

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.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life.

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'.

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.

Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life's short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily.

The beauty of life, is that you don't have to be modernly beautiful to live it.

For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

Anyone who endeavors to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened. You are embarking on something that is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

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.

I wish I had never been born," she said.
"What are we born for?"
"For infinite happiness," said the Spirit.
"You can step out into it at any moment.

When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.

Golly,' said Edmund under his breath, 'He's a retired star.

Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things.

An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.

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.

Through pride the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every vice, it's the complete anti-God state of mind.

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.

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

Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's) you don't realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary.

The more pride we have, the more other people's pride irritates us.

Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?

If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?

Could one start a Stagnation Party-which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?

God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.

When golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift?

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, Thy will be done, and those to whom God says, All right, then, have it your way.

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

Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading.

Tea should be taken in solitude.

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

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

The whole journey was odd and dream-like -- the roaring stream, the wet grey grass, the glimmering cliffs which they were approaching, and always the glorious, silently pacing beast ahead.

All these toys were never intended to possess my heart. My true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!

The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back to the simple principles, which we're so anxious not to see.

The difference God's timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite.

The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.

We who defend Christianity find ourselves constantly opposed not by the irreligion of our headers but by their real religion.

As for wrinkles -- Pshaw! Why shouldn't we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Oh, I'm a dangerous criminal, I am,' said the dwarf cheerfully.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

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.

No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'.

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

Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

The Christians say that God has done miracles. The modern world, even when it believes in God, and even when it has see the defenselessness of nature, does not. It thinks God would not do that sort of thing.

God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.

It's like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.

There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.

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.

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.

Don't you mind," said Puddleglum. "There are no accidents. Our guide is Aslan; and he was there when the giant king caused the letters to be cut, and he knew already all things that would come of them; including this.

Christ, who said to the disciples, 'You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.'

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.

As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.

Whatever men expect, they soon come to think they have a right to; the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury. (senior devil speaking).

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.

Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.

Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere "opiate of the people" have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor.

Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?

She did not shut it properly because she knew that it is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one.

The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly nothing.

The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.

I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.

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

The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth -- the very thing the whole story has been about.

Either Jesus is the Son of God ; or a madman or worse. But His
being just a great teacher? He's not left that open to us.

Enemy-occupied territory -- -that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

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

Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

The mouse is a fair treat but this one would talk the hind legs off a donkey.

Hail Lord, ...Loose my chains.

Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did.

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.

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.

Look for the valleys, the green places, and fly through them. There will always be a way through.

Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars: you have to let go at some point in order to move forward.

Joy is the serious business of heaven.

What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?'

Something of God... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.

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 only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world; but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.

Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.

Agnostics talk cheerfully of man's search for God but they might as well talk about the mouse's search for the cat.

Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.

I believe that there are too many practitioners in the church, who are not believers.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.

We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men -- things at once rational and animal.

There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ('man's search for God'!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?

Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.

We are not meant to be perpetually solemn: We must play.

And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to do another and harder and better one.

Besides reasoning about matters of fact, men also make moral judgements.

The longest way round is the shortest way home.

Girls aren't very good at keeping maps in their brains", said Edmund, "That's because we've got something in them", replied Lucy.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.

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

We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely.

Please,' she said, 'You're so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I'd rather be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.

Afflictions are... if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ.

There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.

We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.

Love is unselfishly choosing for another's highest good.

Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.

The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success.

Everywhere, except in theology, there has been a vigorous growth of skepticism about skepticism itself.

Well, sir, if things are real, they're there all the time." "Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.

Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it.

Everything that is not eternal is worthless in eternity.

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

Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together. If the voice within us does not say this it is not the voice of Eros.

God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.

The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.

If we continue to make moral judgements (and whatever we say shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of nature.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.

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

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.

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.

The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one's life.

Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love.

Why must holy places be dark places?

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves... The modern world in comparison, ignores it.

The right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge.

Nobody who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any business to talk about 'misery.'

No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

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.

Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good -- above all, that we are better than someone else -- I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil.

Much is expected from those to whom much is given.

By repenting, one acknowledges them as sins-therefore not to be repeated.

We come to Scripture not to learn a subject but to steep ourselves in a person.

Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that?

I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.

You can't lay down any pattern for God. There are many different ways of bringing people into his Kingdom, even some ways that I specially dislike! I have therefore learned to be cautious in my judgment.

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now... Come further up, come further in!

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

It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.

You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring into his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?

Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.

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.

Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot form their faces like barbedlightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expressioncould easily be mistaken for ferocity.

Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.

Because God created the Natural -- invented it out of His love and artistry -- it demands our reverence.

What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.

To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, not from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees.

We read to know we are not alone.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.

Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. it does involve the belief that god loves man and for his sake became man and died.

Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.

That one small noise brought back the old days to the children's minds more than anything that had happened yet. All the battles and hunts and feasts came rushing into their heads together.

The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.

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.

Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress.

Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.

We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.

The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.

A man whose life has been transformed by Christ cannot help but have his worldview show through.

All names will soon be restored to their proper owners.

Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.

The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event.

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?

Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others.

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.

To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator.

I am struck here by the curious mixture of justice and injustice in our lives. We are blamed for our real faults but usually not on the right occasions.

"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."

Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.

If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.

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

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.

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.

The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more, When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death, And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

If you simply try to tell the truth you will, nine times out of ten, be original without ever having noticed it.

Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.

For the critics who think Chesterton frivolous or 'paradoxical' I have to work hard to feel even pity; sympathy is out of the question.

Narnia! It's all in the wardrobe just like I told you!

We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism -- the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good.

Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved.

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

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.

Friends are seldom found; they are made.

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.

The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.

As a Christian I take it for granted that human history will some day end; and I am offering Omniscience no advice as to the best date for that consummation.

I will not be at the mercy of the telephone!

You can't go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.

The Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one!

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

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.

If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

You weren't a decent man and you didn't do your best. We none of us were and none of us did.

Our Heavenly Father has provided many delightful inns for us along our journey, but he takes great care to see that we do not mistake any of them for home.

I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to "rejoice" as much as by anything else.

Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours.

In such a fearful world, we need a fearless church.

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 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.

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

The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven.

I am in love and out of it I will not go.

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.

Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.

When you go to church you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends.

No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.

And so for a time it looked as if all the adventures were coming to and end; but that was not to be.

Jesus was either a Liar, a Lunatic, or Lord.

I'm a beast, I am, and a Badger what's more. We don't change. We hold on.

Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.

Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier could give some advice.

Good and evil increase at compound interest. That's why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance.

Friendship is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.

We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.

The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.

A little lie is like a little pregnancy it doesn't take long before everyone knows.

We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.

We are finite and God will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.

Friends are like coals in a fire -- together, they glow; apart, they grow cold.

To love at all is to be vulnerable.

Life isn't all fricasseed frogs and eel pie.

The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung.

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one.

Puddleglum's my name. But it doesn't matter if you forget it. I can always tell you again.

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?

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.

Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.

In the name of the Fathers, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes-I mean Amen.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.

The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection.

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

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

When the opposite of your prayer occurs, your prayer hasn't been ignored; it's been considered and refused for your ultimate good.

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Every object you see before you at this moment -the walls, ceiling, and furniture, the book, your own washed hands and cut fingernails, bears witness to the colonization of Nature of Reason.

No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

Literary Experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.. .Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.

The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.

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.

Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.

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.

It is always the novice who exaggerates.

Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.

You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.

We have discovered that the scheme of 'outlawing war' has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant.

Joy is the serious business of heaven. Our merriment must be between people who take each other seriously.

Catch a man at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, "By jove, I'm being humble," and almost immediately pride -- pride at his own humility -- will appear.

Read and Re-Read -- "Re-reading, we always find a new book.

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.

If we only have the will to walk, then God is pleased with our stumbles.

Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument...Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

Be good, sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can.

All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.

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

Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.

It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.

The idea which...shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience.

Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

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

The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.

The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past.

Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side.

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

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.

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

If conversion makes no improvements in a man's outward actions then I think his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.

The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

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

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

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them.

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.

It certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

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

In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.

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

Satan always sends error into the world in pairs that are opposites. His great hope is that you will get so upset about one of his errors, that you'll react into the opposite one, and he's got you.

Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even agony into a glory.

Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done.

In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.

Every poem can be considered in two ways -- as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

God is love, and that love works through men-especially through the whole community of Christians.

It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good.

The holier a man becomes, the more he mourns over the unholiness which remains in him.

Imagine yourself as a living house.

Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.

I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell; and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.

The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed.

For jokes as well as justice come in with speech.

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

Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise or a sacrilegious abuse of an authority by divine right.

A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food.

Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.

The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that's new to him.

Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

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.

I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous.

On the whole, God's love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him.

Grief. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.

There might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death.

I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.

The difference between the old and the new education being in a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

We only learn to behave ourselves in the presence of God.

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

A man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.

By gum,' said Digory, 'Don't I just wish I was big enough to punch your head!

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

As long as you are proud, you cannot know God.

When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.

Of course, we are to pray for spiritual awakening, and in various ways we can do something toward it. But we must remember that neither Paul nor Apollos gives the increase.

Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'

You Too? I thought I was the only one.

When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary.

The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.

God is not an optional extra, He's an absolute must!

We have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.

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

It was a full moon and, shining on all the snow, it made everything almost as bright as day -- only the shadows were rather confusing.

The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.

That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves part of eternal reality.

That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.

Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.

We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.

For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

To love is to be vulnerable.

We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.

The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn't stayed put and all has to be done over again.

A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all--and more amusing.

Christian love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.

I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most, or else just silly.

Miracles are for beginners.

One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.

Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.

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.

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.

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.

One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up.

Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it.

There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.

Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.

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

You cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus in a woman's body.

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.

It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

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.

Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.

I have seen landscapes ... which, under a particular light, make me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.

Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also.

The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.

I desired dragons with a profound desire.

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."

But Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

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.

True friends don't spend time gazing into each other's eyes. They may show great tenderness towards each other but they face in the same direction -- toward common projects, goals -- above all, towards a common Lord.

Humility is self-forgetfulness.

Now sir, said the bulldog in his business-like way. 'Are you a animal, vegetable, or mineral?' -- The Magician's Nephew.

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.

You can't get second things by putting them first. You get second things only by putting first things first.

God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

One always feel better when one has made up one's mind.

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

There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.

I awoke in a cold room, hunched on the floor beside a black and empty grate, the clock striking three, and the siren howling overhead.

The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.

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.

If you thirst you may drink.

And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.

He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand.

No one can teach riding so well as a horse.

Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself.

What we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. In the main I loved you for my own sake: because I needed you...We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly.

Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way.

One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.

What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love them.

I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't.

If you never take risks, you'll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.

No interviews without appointments except between nine and ten p.m. on second Saturdays.

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

Have you not seen that in our days
Of any whose story, song or art
Delights us, our sincerest praise
Means, when all's said, 'You break my heart?'

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness.

I object to that remark very strongly! -- The Magician's Nephew.

I see you are an idiot, whatever else you may be.

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

I don't pray so that I can change God. I pray so that God can change me.

Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Some journeys take us far from home. Some adventures lead us to our destiny.

One is sometimes glad not to be a great theologian; one might easily mistake it for being a good Christian.

The old field of space, time, matter, and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

If you do one good deed, your reward is to be set to do another and harder and better one.

Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.

History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

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.

Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated.

I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

And I was the Lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult to save.

Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?

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.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

Don't judge a man by where he is, because you don't know how far he has come.

The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don't.

I pray because the need flows out of me all the time-walking and sleeping. It does not change God -- it changes me.

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose."

Every contact you make with everyone you meet will help them or hinder them on their journey to heaven.

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.

Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience.

A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.

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

All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only beloved who will never pass away.

If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, also we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for another world.

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.

I'm tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.

He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ.

Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us -- an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof 'God did it' and 'I did it' are both true descriptions.

Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.

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

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

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

We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.

The hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as the substitute is to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal.

He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.

Am I to understand,' said Reepicheep to Lucy after a long stare at Eustace, 'That this singularly discourteous person is under your Majesty's protection? Because, if not.

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.

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.

There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.

When the most important things in our life happen we
quite often do not know, at the moment, what is
going on.

Mercy detached from justice grows unmerciful.

Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.

I'd sooner live among people who don't cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.

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

In silence and in meditation on the eternal truths, I hear the voice of God which excites our hearts to greater love.

In order that we finite beings may apprehend the Emporer He translates His glory into multiple forms -- into stars, woods, waters, beasts, and the bodies of men.

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

Friendship is born at that moment when a single particular person claims to a different: 'What! You far too? I assumed I was the only real one particular.

When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason. Ho, my beauties!

Is there a difference between a man who thinks that honesty is the best policy, and an honest man?

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.

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.

Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself."

In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person's place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.

He who has not forgiven an enemy has never yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.

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

God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.

Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again.

Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

No more I do, your Majesty. But what's that got to do with it? I might as well die on a wild goose chase as die here.

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.

God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain.

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not.

If you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.

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.

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

Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

A God. The God. One word can make all the difference in the world.

When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.

We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.

"I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms," said the Lion. It didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.

You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the univerise in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.

A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.

It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain.

It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.

Not to be, but to seem, virtuous -- it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.

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.

Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body-different from one another and each contributing what no other could.

The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind.

An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds' wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.

If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain.

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

Virtue -- even attempted virtue -- brings light; indulgence brings fog.

At least he went on saying this till Aslan had loaded him up with three dwarfs, one dryad, two rabbits, and a hedgehog, that steadied him a bit.

We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good; if bad, because it works in us patience, humility, contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.

It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things; but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.

If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it.

My friendship you shall have, leanred Man," piped Reepicheep. "And any Dwarf -- or Giant -- -in the army who does not give you good language shall have my sword to reckon with.

The Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.

And a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.

Will the others see you too?" asked Lucy. "Certainly not at first," said Aslan. "Later on, it depends." "But they won't believe me!" said Lucy. "It doesn't matter.

In the truest sense, Christian pilgrims have the best of both worlds. We have joy whenever this world reminds us of the next, and we take solace whenever it does not.

Enemy occupied territory is what the world is.

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

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.

Our temptation is to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers.

Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest upon reciprocity.

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

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

Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.

If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic -- to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them.

You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.

If nothing in this world satisfies me, perhaps it is because I was made for another world.

Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.

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.

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

You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.

It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.

Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam -- he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.

Prosperity knits a man to the world.

Christ says, 'Give me all. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You.'

In worship, God imparts himself to us.

Until you have given up yourself to Him, you will not have a real self.

God's love is not wearied by our sins and is relentless in its determination that we be cured at whatever cost to us or Him.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

When we are lost in the woods, the sight of a signpost is a great matter.

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.

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self -- all your wishes and precautions -- to Christ.

There seems to be hardly any one among my acquaintance from whom I have not learned.