C.S. Lewis Quotes (411 Quotes)

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.

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 with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.

You're a mere chick. I remember you when you were a egg. Don't come trying to teach me, sir. Crabs and crumpets!

The mouse is a fair treat but this one would talk the hind legs off a donkey.

Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.

A world of automata - of creatures that worked like machines - would hardly be worth creating.

If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.

The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.

But all night, Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes.

The worst of sleeping out of doors is that you wake up so dreadfully early. And when you wake up you have to get up because the ground is so hard you are uncomfortable. And it makes matters worse if there is nothing but apples for breakfast and you have had nothing but apples for supper the night before.

She remembered, as every sensible person does, that you should never never shut yourself up in a wardrobe.

The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.

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!

Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.

No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.

It is always the novice who exaggerates.

When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.

A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.

There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.

Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.

It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.

But when day came, with a sprinkle of rain, and he looked about him and saw on every side an unknown woods, wild heaths, and blue mountain, he thought how large and strange the world was and felt frightened and small.

They did nothing wrong their time here has ended

That world is ended, as if it had never been. Let the race of Adam and Eve take warning.

There have been men before à who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himselfà as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.

He's right. We have to help Mr. Tumnus.

Oh, Adam's sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!

It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

Ah, you've come over the water. Powerful wet stuff, ain't it?

Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy.

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.

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.

It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power -- it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.

The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.

Cobbles and kettledrums! ...I hope this madness isn't going to end in a moonlit climb and broken necks.

Things never happen the same way twice.

We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.

There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.

All names will soon be restored to their proper owners.

I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.

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

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.

A Centaur has a man-stomach and a horse-stomach. And of course both want breakfast. So first of all he has porridge and pavenders and kidneys and bacon and omlette and cold ham and toast and marmalade and coffee and beer. And after that he tends to the horse part of himself by grazing for an hour or so and finishing up with a hot mash, some oats, and a bag of sugar. That's why it's such a serious thing to ask a Centaur to stay for the weeekend. A very serious thing indeed.

And that's why, gentleman, if your little girl doesn't come up to scratch, it will be our painful duty to cut all your throats. Merely in a way of business, as you might say, and no offense, I hope.

And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.

You don't think - not possibly - not as a mere hundredth chance - there might be things that are real though we can't see them? … If there are souls, could there not be soul-houses?