C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
After the death of his wife

C. S. Lewis
The worst of sleeping out of doors is that you wake up so dreadfully early. And when you wake up you have to get up because the ground is so hard you are uncomfortable. And it makes matters worse if there is nothing but apples for breakfast and you have had nothing but apples for supper the night before.

C. S. Lewis
In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Lucifer] could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige.

C. S. Lewis
Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.

C. S. Lewis
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

C. S. Lewis
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' —or else not.

C. S. Lewis
The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.

C. S. Lewis
If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which 'took these things into account' was not faith but imagination.

C. S. Lewis
Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.

C. S. Lewis
I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.

C. S. Lewis
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

C. S. Lewis
When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.

C. S. Lewis
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

C. S. Lewis
If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

C. S. Lewis
If you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ's body...every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who along can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be a odd way of getting him to do more work.

C. S. Lewis
Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.

C. S. Lewis
The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.

C. S. Lewis
The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered. For all its vast spaces it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered by-ways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?

C. S. Lewis
Beloved," said the Glorious One, "unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.

C. S. Lewis
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself.

C. S. Lewis
Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.

C. S. Lewis
No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights.

C. S. Lewis
Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.

C. S. Lewis
It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.

C. S. Lewis
At the end of all things, the blessed will say, 'We never lived anywhere but in heaven.'

C. S. Lewis
All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.

C. S. Lewis
He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.

C. S. Lewis
There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

C. S. Lewis
Mr. Neo-Angular – I am doing my duty. My ethics are based on dogma, not on feeling. Vertue – I know that a rule is to be obeyed because it is a rule and not because it appeals to my feelings at the moment.

C. S. Lewis
Whatever men expect, they soon come to think they have a right to; the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury. (senior devil speaking)

C. S. Lewis