C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

When there came a sound that I'd never heard the like of in all my born days. Eh, I won't forget that. The whole air was full of it, loud as thunder but far longer, cool and sweet as music over water but strong enough to shake the woods. And I said to myself, 'If that's not the Horn, call me a rabbit.

C. S. Lewis
He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.

C. S. Lewis
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.

C. S. Lewis
'But why,' (some ask), 'why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?' Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by 'character delineation' is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?

C. S. Lewis
Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.

C. S. Lewis
It is because they have no Oyarsa,' said one of the pupils. It is because everyone of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,' said Augray.

C. S. Lewis
Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly - are done worst when we try hardest to do them.

C. S. Lewis
Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated

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

C. S. Lewis
"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
Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.

C. S. Lewis
Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy.

C. S. Lewis
A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food.

C. S. Lewis
The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.

C. S. Lewis
I was wondering — I mean — could there be some mistake? Because nobody called me and Scrubb, you know. It was we who asked to come here. You would not have called me unless I had been calling you.

C. S. Lewis
He didn't call his father and mother 'Father' and 'Mother' but Harold and Alberta. They were very up to date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers, and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

C. S. Lewis