C.S. Lewis Quotes (411 Quotes)

Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards obeying the others.

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong, but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table.

This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there's a rumor going around the shop that some of us are someday going to come to life.

Giant Wimbleweather burst into one of those not very intelligent laughs to which the nicer sort of Giants are so liable. He checked himself at once and looked as grace as a turnip by the time Reepicheep discovered where the noise came from.

Wouldn't it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you'd never know which were which.

A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.

But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.

Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.

Once a kind or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen...

A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all-and more amusing.

Suspicion often creates what it suspects.

And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.

For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.

But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them.

Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin

Hail Lord, ...Loose my chains.

You have no idea what an appetite it gives one, being executed.

And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.

Come, live with me and you'll know me.

His face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say.

She did not shut it properly because she knew that it is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one.

A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others...thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people's rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.

The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.

And the Prince stared at her like a man out of his wits.

Gone! ...And you and I quite crestfallen.

Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.

Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.

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

We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.

I don't want to hold you hand!

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.

Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makes of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.

Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours.

I expect you have seen someone put a a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened; and then you notice a tiny steak of flame creeping along the edged of the newspaper. It was like that now.

The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?

All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door.

The duty of planning tomorrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present.

And there's one thing about this underground work, we shan't get any rain.

Gone! And you and I quite crestfallen. It's always like that, you can't keep him; it's not as if he were a tame lion.

I have seen something like it happen in battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped out cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face - friends for a moment - and then at once enemies again and forever.

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.

Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it.

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

I'm a beast, I am, and a Badger what's more. We don't change. We hold on.

Even I never dreamed of Magic like this!

Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.

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

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