C. S. Lewis Quotes (62 Quotes)


    How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

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

    If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

    The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

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


    Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

    What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

    Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.


    Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

    I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

    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.

    Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

    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."

    You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

    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.

    Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

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

    Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

    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.

    Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

    Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

    I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

    With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

    God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

    Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

    An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

    There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.

    You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

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

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

    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.

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

    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.

    Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

    If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

    Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

    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.

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

    It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.


    Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas 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 ever having noticed it.

    The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

    By evolving, Life is solving
    All the questions we perplexed.

    Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

    No clever arrangement of bad eggs ever made a good omelet.

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

    It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

    Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

    Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.


    More C. S. Lewis Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Christianity - Man - God - Education - Miracles - Truth - Facts - Reasoning - Humility - Literature - Friendship - Art - People - Devils - World - Power - Belief & Faith - Infinity - Present - View All C. S. Lewis Quotations

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