Inspiring Quotes by C. S. Lewis

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.

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 desired dragons with a profound desire.

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.

Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.

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.

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

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.

An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.

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

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

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.

Hail Lord, ...Loose my chains.

Imagine yourself as a living house.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

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.

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

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.

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.

Enemy occupied territory is what the world is.