C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?

C. S. Lewis
Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more, When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death, And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

C. S. Lewis
I'm hunger. I'm thirst. Where I bite, I hold till I die, and even after death they must cut out my mouthful from my enemy's body and bury it with me. I can fast a hundred years and not die. I can lie a hundred nights on the ice and not freeze. I can drink a river of blood and not burst. Show me your enemies.

C. S. Lewis
Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.

C. S. Lewis
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

C. S. Lewis
They were really getting quite fond of their strange pet and hoped that Aslan would allow them to keep it. The cleverer ones were quite sure by now that at least some of the noises which came out of his mouth had a meaning. They christened him Brandy because he made that noise so often.

C. S. Lewis
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

C. S. Lewis
Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.

C. S. Lewis
Savage – There is only one way fit for a man – Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.

C. S. Lewis
It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.

C. S. Lewis
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

C. S. Lewis
Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.

C. S. Lewis
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call "ourselves," to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be "good.

C. S. Lewis
Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.

C. S. Lewis
What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

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
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
The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that's new to him.

C. S. Lewis
The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.

C. S. Lewis
It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

C. S. Lewis
The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths—but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.

C. S. Lewis
But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I've described her as being like a sword. That's true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have said 'But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you explore.'
And then, of her, and every created thing I praise, I should say 'in some way, in its unique way, like Him who made it.'
Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. to the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.

C. S. Lewis
Of Lord of the Rings:
Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book which will break your heart.

C. S. Lewis
Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.

C. S. Lewis
Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

C. S. Lewis
But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

C. S. Lewis
The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory

C. S. Lewis
Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.

C. S. Lewis
The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull…

C. S. Lewis
And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.

C. S. Lewis