C.S. Lewis Quotes & Sayings

He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. — C.S. Lewis

We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique. — C.S. Lewis

The man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: Walter Helwich merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull ... — C.S. Lewis

Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. — C.S. Lewis

If there is no God then we have no interest in the minimal religion or any other. We will not make a lie even to save civilization. But if there is, then it is so probable as to be almost axiomatic that the initiative lies wholly on His side. If He can be known it will be by self-revelation on His part, not by speculation on ours. — C.S. Lewis

In my experience, it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate the people who 'happen to be there.' Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed. — C.S. Lewis

The Lion said nothing and Digory knew that he had not told enough. — C.S. Lewis

At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages, mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have - I believe the English already use the phrase - "parity of esteem." An even more drastic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma - Beelzebub, what a useful word! - by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out 'A Cat Sat On A Mat'. — C.S. Lewis

the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. Does — C.S. Lewis

Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together. If the voice within us does not say this it is not the voice of Eros. — C.S. Lewis

My dear young lady,' said the professor ... 'there is one plan which no one has yet suggested and which is well worth trying.'
'What's that?' said Susan.
'We might all try minding our own business ... — C.S. Lewis

In your world, I have another name. You should know me by it. — C.S. Lewis

So many things
nay every real thing
is good if only it will be humble and ordinate. — C.S. Lewis

I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out. — C.S. Lewis

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

Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works. — C.S. Lewis

The only thing Christianity can not be ... is moderately important. — C.S. Lewis

Oh-my-Father-and-oh-the-delight-of-my-eyes," began the young man, muttering the words very quickly and sulkily and not at all as if the Tisroc were the delight of his eyes. — C.S. Lewis

Unsatisfactory answers do not become satisfactory by being tentative. — C.S. Lewis

No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul. — C.S. Lewis

I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in 'the High Countries'. — C.S. Lewis

He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself. — C.S. Lewis

We are a little land. And little lands on the borders of a great empire were always hateful to the lords of the great empire. He longs to blot them out, gobble them up. — C.S. Lewis

Maybe it will go away,' said Lucy.
'It'll be worse if it does,' said Edmund, 'because then we shan't know where it is. If there is a wasp in the room I like to be able to see it. — C.S. Lewis

The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. — C.S. Lewis

You couldn't expect good times to last. — C.S. Lewis

For to be afraid of oneself is the last horror. But, — C.S. Lewis

Friends are seldom found; they are made. — C.S. Lewis

Harold says one of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to Facts. It — C.S. Lewis

We are not meant to be perpetually solemn: We must play. — C.S. Lewis

To love at all is to be vulnerable. — C.S. Lewis

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse. — C.S. Lewis

[S]omething inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it anymore. That is not how things happen. I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible. — C.S. Lewis

I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him. — C.S. Lewis

Autumn is really the best of the seasons — C.S. Lewis

Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse - so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years! — C.S. Lewis

As a Christian I take it for granted that human history will some day end; and I am offering Omniscience no advice as to the best date for that consummation. — C.S. Lewis

We're in a world where everything, even a lamp-post, comes to life and grows. Now I wonder what kind of a seed a lamp-post grows from ... — C.S. Lewis

If our deepest desires cannot be satisfied in this world, then we must have been made for another world. — C.S. Lewis

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index. — C.S. Lewis

Give no poor fool the pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows. — C.S. Lewis

The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success. — C.S. Lewis

To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator.
When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest t all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed bu increased. — C.S. Lewis

He wondered how he could ever have thought of the planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness. — C.S. Lewis

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

That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God. — C.S. Lewis

Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now. Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith? — C.S. Lewis

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

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now ... Come further up, come further in! — C.S. Lewis

Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. (And) There is no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Righ and Wrong are ... — C.S. Lewis

If it is foolish and impudent to ask for victory in a war (on the ground that God might be expected to know best), it would be equally foolish and impudent to put on a mackintosh - does not God know best whether you ought to be wet or dry? — C.S. Lewis

True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty. — C.S. Lewis

At any rate', said I, 'we can now state the problem accurately. People usually think the problem is how to reconcile what we now know about the size of the universe with our traditional ideas of religion. That turns out not to be the problem at all. The real problem is this. The enormous size of the universe and the insignificance of the earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question. Then, less than a hundred years ago, they are suddenly trotted out as an argument against Christianity. And the people who trot them out carefully hush up the fact that they were known long ago. Don't you think that all you atheists are strangely unsuspicious people? — C.S. Lewis

Education and all sorts of horrible things are going to happen to me. — C.S. Lewis

Progress means movement in a desired direction, and we do not all desire the same things for our species. — C.S. Lewis

Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. — C.S. Lewis

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. — C.S. Lewis

[Death] is a safety-device because, once Man has fallen, natural immortality would be the one utterly hopeless destiny for him. — C.S. Lewis

Could one start a Stagnation Party-which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place? — C.S. Lewis

they'd have him as right as rain in a day or two. And — C.S. Lewis

'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

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

It you'd only listen to me when I tried to tell you, we'd be all right. — C.S. Lewis

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. — C.S. Lewis

What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other. — C.S. Lewis

On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, ... they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally. — C.S. Lewis

The enemy will not see you vanish into God's company without an effort to reclaim you. — C.S. Lewis

All things (e.g. a camel's journey through
A needle's eye) are possible, it's true.
But picture how the camel feels, squeezed out
In one long bloody thread, from tail to snout. — C.S. Lewis

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. — C.S. Lewis

In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of. — C.S. Lewis

Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived. — C.S. Lewis

Why must holy places be dark places? — C.S. Lewis

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. — C.S. Lewis

But it is in the rooms, not the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. — C.S. Lewis

Even if the two lovers are mature and experienced people who know that broken hearts heal in the end and can clearly foresee that, if they once steeled themselves to go through the present agony of parting, they would almost certainly be happier ten years hence than marriage is at all likely to make them - even then, they would not part. — C.S. Lewis

Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do. — C.S. Lewis

Edmund, give a special goodbye to Trumpkin for me. He's been a brick. — C.S. Lewis

Please,' she said, 'You're so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I'd rather be eaten by you than fed by anyone else. — C.S. Lewis

Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. — C.S. Lewis

The other view is the religious view.* According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And — C.S. Lewis

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

We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all." — C.S. Lewis

Provocation doesn't make me ill-tempered: it only shows me how ill-tempered I am. — C.S. Lewis

You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you, said the Lion. — C.S. Lewis

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. — C.S. Lewis

What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week. — C.S. Lewis

Read and Re-Read
Re-reading, we always find a new book. — C.S. Lewis

And in truth (as I now see) I had the wish to put off my journey as long as I could. Not for any peril or labour it might cost; but because I could see nothing in the whole world for me to do once it was accomplished. AS long as this act lay before me, there was, as it were, some barrier between me and the dead desert which the rest of my life must be. — C.S. Lewis

But as for Aslan himself, the Beavers and the children didn't know what to do or say when they saw him. People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the children had ever thought so, they were cured of it now. For when they tried to look at Aslan's face they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes; and then they found they couldn't look at him and went all trembly. — C.S. Lewis

I was quite safe. That is why the Lion kept on my left. He was between me and the edge all the time. — C.S. Lewis

Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. — C.S. Lewis

It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that 'from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.' To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun. — C.S. Lewis

But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn't yet, or used to be Human once and isn't now, or ought to be Human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet. — C.S. Lewis

We are all fallen creatures and all very hard to live with. — C.S. Lewis

If you give such a creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains: but there is no co-ordinating self which can recognise that 'I have had two pains'. — C.S. Lewis

Our problem is not that we desire too much but too little. — C.S. Lewis

Remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy. — C.S. Lewis

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be. — C.S. Lewis

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

Anger is the fluid that love bleeds when it gets cut. — C.S. Lewis