C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds him liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.

C. S. Lewis
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis
When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing.

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

C. S. Lewis
How difficult it is to avoid having a special standard for oneself.

C. S. Lewis
The Scotch catechism says that man's chief end is 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.' But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.

C. S. Lewis
All that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

C. S. Lewis
Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect.

C. S. Lewis
… in such a matter he would never have been guided by his first thoughts (which would probably have been right) nor even by his twenty-first (which would have at least been explicable). Beyond doubt he would have prolonged deliberation till his hundred-and-first; and they would be infallibly and invincibly wrong. This is what always happens to the deliberations of a simple man who thinks he is a subtle one.

C. S. Lewis
'Welcome, Prince,' said Aslan. 'Do you feel yourself sufficient to take up the Kingship of Narnia?' I - I don't think I do, Sir,' said Caspian. 'I am only a kid.' Good,' said Aslan. 'If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been proof that you were not.'

C. S. Lewis
If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?

C. S. Lewis
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.

C. S. Lewis
I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that?

C. S. Lewis
It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

C. S. Lewis
But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn't yet, or used to be Human once and isn't now, or ought to be Human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.

C. S. Lewis
'Who are you? Nobody. Who is Porridge? THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.'

C. S. Lewis
The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.

C. S. Lewis
When he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realized that while his lips had been saying 'Oh Lord, make me chaste,' his heart had been secretly adding, 'But please don't do it just yet.

C. S. Lewis
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.

C. S. Lewis
Will the others see you too?" asked Lucy. "Certainly not at first," said Aslan. "Later on, it depends." "But they won't believe me!" said Lucy. "It doesn't matter.

C. S. Lewis
The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though the world might last a hundred years.

C. S. Lewis
I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse... Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil.

C. S. Lewis
Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

C. S. Lewis
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.

C. S. Lewis
The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.

C. S. Lewis
When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?

C. S. Lewis
If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?

C. S. Lewis
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

C. S. Lewis
But all night, Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes.

C. S. Lewis
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

C. S. Lewis