C. S. Lewis - Thought Quotes

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If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next... It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get neither.

C. S. Lewis
Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.

C. S. Lewis
The Guide sang: The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, And fools crying, Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun! The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run Faster for ever, The old age is done, We have new lights and see without the sun. (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

C. S. Lewis
If I had really cared as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came- I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me, now it matters and I find I didn't.

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
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.

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
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
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
'you must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.' 'Some that thought that all these loves were copies of our love for the landlord.'

C. S. Lewis
Edmund, who was becoming a nastier person every minute, thought that he had scored a great success, and went on at once to say, 'There she goes again. What's the matter with her?

C. S. Lewis
God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.

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
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
The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time.

C. S. Lewis
Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

C. S. Lewis
I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. Emotional is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.

C. S. Lewis
Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."

C. S. Lewis
If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. It cuts its own throat.

C. S. Lewis
To please God… to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness… to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

C. S. Lewis
Jewel,' he said, 'what lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.

C. S. Lewis
Christian Apocalyptic offers us no such hope. It does not even foretell, (which would be more tolerable to our habits of thought) a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without; an extinguisher popped onto the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain rung down on the play — "Halt!"

C. S. Lewis
The standard of permanent Christianity must be kept clear in our minds and it is against that standard that we must test all contemporary thought. In fact, we must at all costs not move with the times.

C. S. Lewis
If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

C. S. Lewis
"All it means," he thought to himself, "is that he thinks he can do anything he likes to get anything he wants."

C. S. Lewis
Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan.

C. S. Lewis
There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was 'the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.'

C. S. Lewis
Wisdom: The first error is that of the southern people, and it consists in holding that these eastern and western places are real places. … give no quarter to that thought, whether it threatens you with fear, or tempts you with hopes. For this is Superstition and all who believe it will come in the end to the swamps to the south and the jungles to the far south. Part of the same error is to think that the Landlord is a real man.

C. S. Lewis
The chief pleasure of his life in these days was to go down the road and look through the window in the wall in the hope of seeing the beautiful Island. … the sight of the Island and the sounds became very rare … and the yearning for the sight … became so terrible that John thought he would die if he did not have them again soon. … it came into his head that he might perhaps get the old feeling-for what, he thought, had the Island ever given him but a feeling?–by imagining. He shut his eyes and set his teeth again and made a picture of the Island in his mind.

C. S. Lewis
We thought the Duke would have been pleased if the King's Majesty would have married his daughter, but nothing came of that—' Squints, and has freckles,' said Caspian. Oh, poor girl,' said Lucy.

C. S. Lewis