C.S Lewis

91 quotes

Selected quotes · 91

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”

C.S LewisHappiness

“Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”

C.S LewisFreedom

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”

C.S LewisCreativity

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

C.S LewisCourage

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.”

C.S LewisCreativity

“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”

C.S LewisFailure

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

C.S LewisMindset

“Don't shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see Him.”

C.S LewisWisdom

“You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

C.S LewisAction

“God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.”

C.S LewisCreativity

“Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”

C.S LewisWisdom

“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...”

C.S LewisHumility

“If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.”

C.S LewisJustice

“I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity.”

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

C.S LewisSuccess

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”

C.S LewisWisdom

“Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.”

C.S LewisFriendship

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

C.S LewisSelf-belief

“The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.”

C.S LewisCreativity

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

C.S LewisWisdom

“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.”

“Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real right and wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.”

C.S LewisFailure

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

C.S LewisGrowth

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

C.S LewisWisdom

“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.”

C.S LewisFriendship

“We laugh at honor, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

C.S LewisHappiness

“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.”

C.S LewisAction

“Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back everything is different?.”

C.S LewisWisdom

“If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself.”

“The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.”

C.S LewisFreedom

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

C.S LewisWisdom

“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.'”

“It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.”

C.S LewisCreativity

“We’re not creatures that need improvement, we’re rebels that need to lay down their arms.”

C.S LewisGrowth

“The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike.”

C.S LewisFreedom

“What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.”

C.S LewisPhilosophy

“The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.”

“It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter'. There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.”

“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.”

C.S LewisGrowth

“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

C.S LewisCreativity

“I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”

“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.”

C.S LewisFreedom

“Eros will have naked bodies; friendship naked personalities.”

C.S LewisFreedom

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

C.S LewisAction

“I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”

C.S LewisFriendship

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

“Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.”

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

C.S LewisWisdom

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

C.S LewisFreedom

“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”

C.S LewisHappiness

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally - and often far more - worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”

C.S LewisFriendship

“What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”

C.S LewisFriendship

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

C.S LewisJustice

“He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.”

C.S LewisWisdom

“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.”

C.S LewisWisdom

“Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it. Just live it.”

C.S LewisAction

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.”

C.S LewisHumility

“To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God.”

“There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

C.S LewisWisdom

“Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.”

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one'.”

C.S LewisFriendship

“God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.”

“It's not the load that breaks you down. It's the way you carry it.”

C.S LewisWisdom

“Christianity seems at first to be about morality, rules, guilt and virtue, yet it leads you out of that, into something beyond.”

C.S LewisJustice

“If He who in Himself can lack nothing, chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.”

C.S LewisWisdom

“Friendship is unnecessary, it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”

C.S LewisFriendship

“If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it isn't.”

C.S LewisWisdom

“God is not deceived by the externals.”

“Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.”

“Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.”

C.S LewisJustice

“If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality.”

C.S LewisJustice

“A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.”

C.S LewisCreativity

“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”

C.S LewisResilience

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

“History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.”

C.S LewisAction

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

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

C.S LewisHappiness

“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.”

C.S LewisPhilosophy

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

C.S LewisJustice

“Through pride the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every vice, it's the complete anti-God state of mind.”

C.S LewisHumility

“Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”

C.S LewisHappiness

“When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.”

C.S LewisMindset

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

C.S LewisAction

“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say 'My tooth is aching' than to say 'My heart is broken'.”

C.S LewisAction

“The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.”

C.S LewisHappiness

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

C.S LewisCourage

“Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go to move forward.”

C.S LewisWisdom