C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants everyone to use what sense they have.

C. S. Lewis

Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.

C. S. Lewis

For jokes as well as justice come in with speech. - Aslan, The Magician's Nephew

C. S. Lewis

Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted—i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk—don't keep on looking at it.

C. S. Lewis

You have a traitor there, Aslan," said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking about himself after all he'd been through and after the talk he'd had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn't seem to matter what the Witch said.

C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis

She stepped out from among their shifting confusion of lovely lights and shadows. A circle of grass, smooth as a lawn, met her eyes, with dark trees dancing all around it. And then —Oh Joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him.

C. S. Lewis

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God.

C. S. Lewis

The proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator—to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy.

C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

C. S. Lewis

Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.

C. S. Lewis

We have trained them [men] to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

C. S. Lewis

"It isn't Narnia, you know," sobbed Lucy. "It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?" "But you shall meet me, dear one," said Aslan. "Are -are you there too, Sir?" said Edmund. "I am," said Aslan. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."

C. S. Lewis

Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side.

C. S. Lewis

It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power — it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.

C. S. Lewis

Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

C. S. Lewis

Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, on their view, exist...

C. S. Lewis

The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus in a woman's body.

C. S. Lewis

'This is the land of Narnia,' said the Faun, 'where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea.'

C. S. Lewis

We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.

C. S. Lewis

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. Lewis

Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory." Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection — if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.

C. S. Lewis

I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.

C. S. Lewis

Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?

C. S. Lewis

By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the the impossible.

C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis

Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature.

C. S. Lewis

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask — half our great theological and metaphysical problems — are like that.

C. S. Lewis

I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness; you are not needed there at all. No scope of your talents; only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God.

C. S. Lewis