C.S. Lewis Quotes

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

C.S. Lewis

#2. Suffering is not good in itself. What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, his submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads.

C.S. Lewis

#3. Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

C.S. Lewis

#4. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.

C.S. Lewis

#5. A man really ought to say, 'The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago' in the same spirit in which he says, 'I saw a crocus yesterday.' Because we know what is coming behind the crocus.

C.S. Lewis

#6. If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.

C.S. Lewis

#7. Well. You have a secret from me," he said in the end. "No, don't turn away from me. Did you think I would try to press or conjure it out of you? Never that. Friends must be free. My tormenting you to find it would build a worse barrier between us than your hiding it.

C.S. Lewis

#8. Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one.

C.S. Lewis

#9. All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still 'about to be'.

C.S. Lewis

#10. As in arithmetic-there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong; but some answers are much nearer being right than others.

C.S. Lewis

#11. Enemy occupied territory is what the world is.

C.S. Lewis

#12. Put first things first and second things are thrown in. Put second things first and you lose both first and second things.

C.S. Lewis

#13. Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.

C.S. Lewis

#14. Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.

C.S. Lewis

#15. Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say "My tooth is aching" than to say "My heart is broken.

C.S. Lewis

#16. They talked about God. They had no picture in their minds of some mist steaming upward: rather of strong, skillful hands thrust down to make, and mend, perhaps even to destroy.

C.S. Lewis

#17. 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.

C.S. Lewis

#18. Die before you die, there is no chance after.

C.S. Lewis

#19. Always winter but never Christmas.

C.S. Lewis

#20. Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs?

C.S. Lewis

#21. No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights.

C.S. Lewis

#22. 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

C.S. Lewis

#23. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, I am what I do.

C.S. Lewis

#24. To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this.

C.S. Lewis

#25. You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.

C.S. Lewis

#26. If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it's not so bad.

C.S. Lewis

#27. Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#29. The inherent dialectic of desire itself had in way already shown me this; for all images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in the last resort, It is not I. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?

C.S. Lewis

#30. For all find what they truly seek.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#32. Every story of conversion is a story of blessed defeat.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#34. He was a very humane killer too, for he would dispatch a beast with one blow of it's talk so that it didn't know (and presumably doesn't know) it had been killed.

C.S. Lewis

#35. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons - marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning. One

C.S. Lewis

#36. War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.

C.S. Lewis

#37. When once passion takes part in the game, the human reason, unassisted by Grace, has about as much chance of retaining its hold on truths already gained as a snowflake has of retaining its consistency in the mouth of a blast furnace.

C.S. Lewis

#38. To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere.

C.S. Lewis

#39. 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. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies.

C.S. Lewis

#40. It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.

C.S. Lewis

#41. 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.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#43. Only keep your ears open and your mouth shut and everything will lead you to everything else in the end - ogni

C.S. Lewis

#44. If there is a wasp in the room, I'd like to be able to see it.

C.S. Lewis

#45. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson.

C.S. Lewis

#46. Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles.

C.S. Lewis

#47. 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.

C.S. Lewis

#48. -and when it was over they wished it was going to begin again.

C.S. Lewis

#49. The tuning up of an orchestra can be itself delightful, but only to those who can in some measure, however little, anticipate the symphony.

C.S. Lewis

#50. When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.

C.S. Lewis

#51. The most intense joy, lies not in the having,
but in the desire,
Delight that never fades, bliss that is eternal,
Is only your, when what you most desire, is just out of reach ... Anthony Hopkins, from the movie Shadowlands, where he plays C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis

#52. Much is expected from those to whom much is given.

C.S. Lewis

#53. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure [is] to start examining your satisfaction.

C.S. Lewis

#54. Christians never say goodbye!

C.S. Lewis

#55. It matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth.

C.S. Lewis

#56. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.

C.S. Lewis

#57. Even though Education and all sorts of horrible things are going to happen to me. But you want the story. Well, Corin and I were twins.

C.S. Lewis

#58. Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, "democracy." But now "democracy" can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own.

C.S. Lewis

#59. Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

C.S. Lewis

#60. His hands had been reddened, like all men's hands, in the slaying before the foundation of the world.

C.S. Lewis

#61. I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.

C.S. Lewis

#62. 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.

C.S. Lewis

#63. Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.

C.S. Lewis

#64. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#66. But when your sword breaks, you draw your dagger.

C.S. Lewis

#67. We read to know we are not alone (obviously not mine but good)

C.S. Lewis

#68. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper throughs than anyone else.

C.S. Lewis

#69. The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.

C.S. Lewis

#70. To get even near humility, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.

C.S. Lewis

#71. 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.

C.S. Lewis

#72. Even I never dreamed of Magic like this!

C.S. Lewis

#73. The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

C.S. Lewis

#74. If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam, and that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out.

C.S. Lewis

#75. God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity ... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him.

C.S. Lewis

#76. Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#78. It is a Christian duty, as you know, for every-one to be as happy as he can.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#81. I am inclined to think a Christian would be wise to avoid, where he decently can, any meeting with people who are bullies, lascivious, cruel, dishonest, spiteful and so forth.

C.S. Lewis

#82. At the end of all things, the blessed will say, 'We never lived anywhere but in heaven.'

C.S. Lewis

#83. The fact that you are giving money to charity does not mean that you need
not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not.

C.S. Lewis

#84. The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.

C.S. Lewis

#85. I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story.

C.S. Lewis

#86. I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master ... The quality that had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live.

C.S. Lewis

#87. If you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without every having noticed it.

C.S. Lewis

#88. If He, who in Himself can lack nothing, chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

C.S. Lewis

#89. Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.

C.S. Lewis

#90. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted,

C.S. Lewis

#91. From at least the age of six, romantic longing
Sechnsucht
has played an unusually central part of my experience. Such longing is in itself the very reverse of wishful thinking: it is more like thoughtful wishing.

C.S. Lewis

#92. A noble friend is the best gift. A noble enemy is the next best.

C.S. Lewis

#93. 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?

C.S. Lewis

#94. The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.

C.S. Lewis

#95. Young men are supposed to think themselves immortal, but the subject is not very often out of my mind for a long time together.

C.S. Lewis

#96. The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty.

C.S. Lewis

#97. 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.

C.S. Lewis

#98. The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time
for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.

C.S. Lewis

#99. In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes; in the myth it is a fact about improvements.

C.S. Lewis

#100. 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.

C.S. Lewis