C.S. Lewis Quotes (411 Quotes)

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.

Prince Caspian lived in a great castle in the center of Narnia with his uncle, Miraz, the King of Narnia, and his aunt, who had red hair and was called Queen Prunaprismia.

No people find each other more absurd than lovers

And so for a time it looked as if all the adventures were coming to and end; but that was not to be.

I do not expect old heads on young shoulders.

Suppose... suppose we have only dreamed and made up these things like sun, sky, stars, and moon, and Aslan himself. In that case, it seems to me that the made-up things are a good deal better than the real ones. And if this black pits of a kingdom is the best you can make, then it's a poor world. And we four can make a dream world to lick your real one hollow.

It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.

Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.

Even I never dreamed of Magic like this!

Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like.

They were pretty tired by now of course; but not what I'd call bitterly tired - only slow and feeling very dreamy and tired as one does when one is coming to the end of a long day in the open.

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.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

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

Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?

Always winter but never Christmas.

They were really getting quite fond of their strange pet and hoped that Aslan would allow them to keep it. The cleverer ones were quite sure by now that at least some of the noises which came out of his mouth had a meaning. They christened him Brandy because he made that noise so often.

Ah, poor Pole. It's been to much for her, this last bit. Turned her head, I shouldn't wonder. She's beginning to see things.

And in that far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this will happen more and more. For mortals, as you said, will become more and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature.

The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.

She looked at a silver birch: it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty, old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his fact and hands, with hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah! --she would be the best of all. She would be a gracious goddess, smooth and stately, the Lady of the Wood.

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

Are you my councilor or my slave, said the witch.

I do wish Slumtrimpet could do something about undermining that young woman's sense of the ridiculous.

They stormed and jeered at one another in long meaningless words of about twenty syllables each.

No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.

For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

We need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.