767 Quotes by C. S. Lewis (Page 5 of 6)

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

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

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly; while you are making them you cannot see them. Good people know about both bad and evil; bad people do not know about either.

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

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

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

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

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

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.

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

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

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.

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

You Too? I thought I was the only one.

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

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

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.

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

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

When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.

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

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

If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.

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.

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

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

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

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

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

You can make anything by writing.

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

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

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?

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

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 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.

I'm not sure God wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering.

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

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.

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

Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to 'cure' it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers.

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

Love is unselfishly choosing for another's highest good.

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.

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.

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

Much is expected from those to whom much is given.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Of course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking with cheerful seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.

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

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

Friends are seldom found; they are made.

Everything that is not eternal is worthless in eternity.

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

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.'

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

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

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

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

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

Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much are what make us perfect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There are far, far better things ahead than anything we leave behind.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

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

Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

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

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

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

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

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.

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

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

'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'

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

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.'