Inspiring Quotes by C. S. Lewis
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Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

If you thirst you may drink.

To love at all is to be vulnerable.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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?'

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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?'

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

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

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

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.

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.

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