C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.

C. S. Lewis
It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.

C. S. Lewis
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

C. S. Lewis
And that's why, when they want to get rid of anyone, they usually bring him down here (like they were doing with me) and say they'll leave him to the ghosts. But I always wondered if they didn't really drown 'em or cut their throats. I never quite believed in the ghosts. But those two cowards you've just shot believed all right. They were more scared of taking me to my death than I was of going.

C. S. Lewis
If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all

C. S. Lewis
Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

C. S. Lewis
We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.

C. S. Lewis
It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

C. S. Lewis
Away with tears and fears and troubles! United in wedlock with the eternal Godhead Itself, our nature ascends into the Heaven of Heavens. So it would be impious to call ourselves 'miserable.' On the contrary, Man is a creature whom the Angels-were they capable of envy-would envy. Let us lift up our hearts!

C. S. Lewis
What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all".

C. S. Lewis
As image and apprehension are in organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.

C. S. Lewis
How little people know who think that holiness is dull... When one meets the real thing, it's irresistible!

C. S. Lewis
Well, sir, if things are real, they're there all the time." "Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.

C. S. Lewis
An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath.

C. S. Lewis
A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. It was hardly a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

C. S. Lewis
You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter.

C. S. Lewis
Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? When I see the temporal suffering of humans who finally escape us, I feel as if I had been allowed to taste the first course of a rich banquet and then denied all the rest. It is worse than not to have tasted it at all. The Enemy, true to His barbarous methods of warfare, allows us to see the short misery of His favourites only to tantalize and torment us — to mock the incessant hunger, which, during this present phase of great conflict, His blockade is admittedly imposing.

C. S. Lewis
Besides reasoning about matters of fact, men also make moral judgements.

C. S. Lewis
Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

C. S. Lewis
I'm a beast, I am, and a Badger what's more. We don't change. We hold on.

C. S. Lewis
Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer.

C. S. Lewis
You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.

C. S. Lewis
And there we all were, as invisible as you could wish to see.

C. S. Lewis
One flesh. Or if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends.

C. S. Lewis
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.

C. S. Lewis
To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is 'remains.'

C. S. Lewis
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

C. S. Lewis
Everyone who believes in God at all believes that he knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.

C. S. Lewis
The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism - for that is what the words 'one flesh' would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact - just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument.

C. S. Lewis
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

C. S. Lewis