C. S. Lewis Quotes

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"Say what you like," we shall be told, "the apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, 'this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.' And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else." It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.

C. S. Lewis
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

C. S. Lewis
Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated

C. S. Lewis
The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.

C. S. Lewis
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.

C. S. Lewis
People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.

C. S. Lewis
A sensible human once said, "If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit"; and again, "She's the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression."

C. S. Lewis
What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.

C. S. Lewis
The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

C. S. Lewis
They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?

C. S. Lewis
For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.

C. S. Lewis
Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.

C. S. Lewis
Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?

C. S. Lewis
Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many...

C. S. Lewis
This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

C. S. Lewis
But I remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intensely silent under old great trees

C. S. Lewis
Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.

C. S. Lewis
'God' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape.

C. S. Lewis
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.

C. S. Lewis
I daren't come and drink," said Jill. Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion. Oh dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer."I suppose I must go and look for another stream then." There is no other stream," said the Lion.

C. S. Lewis
The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.

C. S. Lewis
Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?-Or at least, "Do you care about the same truth?

C. S. Lewis
And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and, oh, gloriously she did) it was for another's sake. The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming. The pillars on the far side of the pool flushed with his approach. I cast down my eyes.

C. S. Lewis
No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.

C. S. Lewis
There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know.

C. S. Lewis
The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.

C. S. Lewis
Our struggle is—isn't it?—to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already

C. S. Lewis
And a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.

C. S. Lewis
Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.

C. S. Lewis
I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.

C. S. Lewis