C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

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

C. S. Lewis
The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)...

C. S. Lewis
We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

C. S. Lewis
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.

C. S. Lewis
The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle.

C. S. Lewis
There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

C. S. Lewis
When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other — the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow — is a prosaic barbarian. But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.

C. S. Lewis
But what manner of use would it be ploughing through that darkness?' asked Drinian. Use?' replied Reepicheep. 'Use, Captain?' If you mean by filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventures. And here is as great an adventure as I have ever heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours.

C. S. Lewis
The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?

C. S. Lewis
Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don't we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive — who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture — almost the précis — we've made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact.

C. S. Lewis
Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control.

C. S. Lewis
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.

C. S. Lewis
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.

C. S. Lewis
There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.

C. S. Lewis
Kids like us don't often have the chance of meeting a great warrior like you. Would you have a little fencing match with me? It would be frightfully decent.

C. S. Lewis
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

C. S. Lewis
Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? WEll, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments)...

C. S. Lewis
No more I do, your Majesty. But what's that got to do with it? I might as well die on a wild goose chase as die here.

C. S. Lewis
It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.

C. S. Lewis
"Aslan" said Lucy "you're bigger". "That is because you are older, little one" answered he. "Not because you are?" "I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger".

C. S. Lewis
The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson: 'Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.'

C. S. Lewis
Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles....He's our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.

C. S. Lewis
I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had.

C. S. Lewis
Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.

C. S. Lewis
God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.

C. S. Lewis
Though under earth, and throneless now I be Yet while I lived all earth was under me.

C. S. Lewis
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

C. S. Lewis
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

C. S. Lewis
Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.

C. S. Lewis
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose that you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it? … Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.

C. S. Lewis