C.S. Lewis Quotes (411 Quotes)

There, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a mans reaction to monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be debunked' but watch the faces, mark the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire equality, they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film-stars instead even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served deny it food and it will gobble poison.

When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.

I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can

Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.

The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said

Which of the religions of the world gives to its followers the greatest happiness While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is best

When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.

God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

Do not waste time bothering whether you love your neighbor act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.

At the end of things, The Blessed will say, We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven. And the lost will say, We were always in Hell. And both will speak truly.