C Lewis Quotes

#1. How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

C.S. Lewis

#2. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.

C.S. Lewis

#3. Bad laws make hard cases.

C.S. Lewis

#4. The problem with trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you so very often succeed.

C.S. Lewis

#5. Most baffling of all to a modern literalist, the God who seems to live locally in the sky, also made it.

C.S. Lewis

#6. The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking "But I never knew before. I never dreamed ... " I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, "It reminds me of straw.

C.S. Lewis

#7. A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

C.S. Lewis

#8. That's the worst of girls," said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. "They never can carry a map in their heads."
"That's because our heads have something inside them," said Lucy.

C.S. Lewis

#9. This moment contains all moments.

C.S. Lewis

#10. That's because Narnia was a Christian allegory pretending to be a fantasy series, you asshole," said one of the other boys. "C.S. Lewis never went through any doors. He didn't know how it worked. He wanted to tell a story, and he'd probably heard about kids like us, and he made shit up.

Seanan McGuire

#11. If the universe is so bad ... how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?

C.S. Lewis

#12. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.

C.S. Lewis

#13. Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!

C.S. Lewis

#14. Got to start by finding it, have we?" answered Puddleglum. " Not allowed to start by looking for it, I suppose?

C.S. Lewis

#15. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is.

C.S. Lewis

#16. For, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys: there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers. What

C.S. Lewis

#17. 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

#18. Nightmares don't last.

C.S. Lewis

#19. There is no excess of goodness. You cannot go too far in the right direction.

C.S. Lewis

#20. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you about the object: it only tells you about the speakers attitude to that object.

C.S. Lewis

#21. The harder you tried not to think, the more you thought.

C.S. Lewis

#22. It promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.

C.S. Lewis

#23. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.

C.S. Lewis

#24. 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

#25. 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.

C.S. Lewis

#26. Miracles are for beginners.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#28. Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.

C.S. Lewis

#29. Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?

C.S. Lewis

#30. You'll never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking what sort of impression you make.

C.S. Lewis

#31. Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity, which, in spite of its divisions, it has never lost. I trembled on recognizing the same unmistakable aroma coming from the writings of Dante and Bunyan, Thomas Aquinas and William Law.

C.S. Lewis

#32. 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.

C.S. Lewis

#33. One is given strength to bear what happens to one, but not the 100 and 1 different things that might happen.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#36. For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being.

C.S. Lewis

#37. If things are real, they're there all the time.

C.S. Lewis

#38. In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.

C.S. Lewis

#39. Sweet master doctor, learned master doctor, who ever heard of a witch that really died? You can always get them back.

C.S. Lewis

#40. But the trouble is that what we call "asking God's forgiveness" very often really consists in asking God to accept our excuses.

C.S. Lewis

#41. As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.

C.S. Lewis

#42. 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

#43. Things never happen the same way twice.

C.S. Lewis

#44. The only thing Christianity can not be ... is moderately important.

C.S. Lewis

#45. What one must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation.

C.S. Lewis

#46. We are arguing like a man who should say, if there were an invisible cat in that empty chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it.

C.S. Lewis

#47. If ever they remembered their life in this world it was as one remembers a dream.

C.S. Lewis

#48. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.

C.S. Lewis

#49. Open, oh coloured world, without weight, without shore. You are second and better; this was first and feeble.

C.S. Lewis

#50. Man must endure his going hence.

C.S. Lewis

#51. It's expression was solemn, its complexion muddy.

C.S. Lewis

#52. To know what would have happened, child? said Aslan. No. Nobody is ever told that.

C.S. Lewis

#53. The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#55. This lasted longer than I could describe even if I wrote pages and pages about it.

C.S. Lewis

#56. It is not that we do not believe the Lord wants the best for us. It is that we wonder how painful the best will be.

C.S. Lewis

#57. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows-the only food that any possible universe ever can grow-then we must starve eternally.

C.S. Lewis

#58. Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling ... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.

C.S. Lewis

#59. As his (C. S. Lewis's) good friend Owen Barfield once remarked, Lewis radiated a sense that the spiritual world is home, that we are always coming back to a place we have never yet reached.

David C. Downing

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

C.S. Lewis

#61. It you'd only listen to me when I tried to tell you, we'd be all right.

C.S. Lewis

#62. We know nothing of religion here: we only think of Christ.

C.S. Lewis

#63. Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

C.S. Lewis

#64. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes - I mean Amen,' said Ransom, and hurled the stone as hard as he could into the Un-man's face.

C.S. Lewis

#65. The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him.

C.S. Lewis

#66. But sweat is the kindest creature of the three - far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts.

C.S. Lewis

#67. It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure they are always very 'spiritual', that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#69. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.

C.S. Lewis

#70. We must remember that the soul is but a hollow which God fills.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#72. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?

C.S. Lewis

#73. The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose.

C.S. Lewis

#74. What was myth in one world might always be fact in some other.

C.S. Lewis

#75. To generalize is to be an idiot, said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage.

C.S. Lewis

#76. The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

C.S. Lewis

#77. The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike ... Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.

C.S. Lewis

#78. The people who keep asking if they can't lead a decent life without Christ, don't know what life is about; if they did they would know that 'a decent life' is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for.

C.S. Lewis

#79. Did Maleldil suggest that our own world might have been saved if the elephant had accidentally trodden on the serpent a moment before Eve was about to yield?

C.S. Lewis

#80. Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#83. Things always work according to their nature.

C.S. Lewis

#84. 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.

C.S. Lewis

#85. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the individual.

C.S. Lewis

#86. It takes courage to live through suffering; and it takes honesty to observe it.

C.S. Lewis

#87. '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.'

C.S. Lewis

#88. When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death.

C.S. Lewis

#89. You keep a grip of my heels, Pole, and Scrubb would hold on to yours. The we'll all be comfortable.

C.S. Lewis

#90. Such, then, was my position: to care for almost nothing but the gods and heroes, the garden of the Hesperides, Launcelot and the Grail, and to believe in nothing but atoms and evolution and military service.

C.S. Lewis

#91. Every joy is beyond all others.

C.S. Lewis

#92. An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

C.S. Lewis

#93. Delight is incomplete until it is expressed.

C.S. Lewis

#94. The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time.

C.S. Lewis

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

C.S. Lewis

#96. The more he fears, the more he'll hate.

C.S. Lewis

#97. Then it was you who wounded Aravis?"
"It was I."
"But what for?"
"Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.

C.S. Lewis

#98. That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin.

C.S. Lewis

#99. For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are. Ever

C.S. Lewis

#100. I felt ashamed."
"But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?"
"No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal
of being a mortal."
"But how could you help that?"
"Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?

C.S. Lewis