C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.

C. S. Lewis
War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.

C. S. Lewis
The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection.

C. S. Lewis
A man can't be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it.

C. S. Lewis
It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose him as an alternative to hell.

C. S. Lewis
When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world

C. S. Lewis
Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let the villans be soundly killed at the end of the book. I think it is possible that by confining your child to the blameless stories of life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable.

C. S. Lewis
The enemy will not see you vanish into God's company without an effort to reclaim you.

C. S. Lewis
I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it.

C. S. Lewis
I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love others less.

C. S. Lewis
A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.

C. S. Lewis
When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive.

C. S. Lewis
Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing.

C. S. Lewis
The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.

C. S. Lewis
What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week.

C. S. Lewis
No, I don't wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.

C. S. Lewis
The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story.

C. S. Lewis
The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right.

C. S. Lewis
I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given.

C. S. Lewis
If crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call 'disease' can be treated as a crime and compulsorily cured.

C. S. Lewis
Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way.

C. S. Lewis
There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them.

C. S. Lewis
I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.

C. S. Lewis
To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves... The modern world in comparison, ignores it.

C. S. Lewis
The naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one's own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote or abstruse; it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.

C. S. Lewis
A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can't put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover.

C. S. Lewis
It is not enough to want to get rid of one's sins, we also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins.

C. S. Lewis
Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Law Giver.

C. S. Lewis
The higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be.

C. S. Lewis
Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.

C. S. Lewis