100+ C. S. Lewis Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

The people with very hard problems are understood by God. He knows what wretched machines they are trying to drive. Some day he will fling them away and give those people new ones; then they may astonish everyone, for they learned their driving in a hard school. Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last.

Topics: Inspirational, School, People

quote you can t go back and change the beginning but you can start where you are and change c s lewis Quotes

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

Topics: Forgiveness, God, Christian, Lord Forgive Me, God Forgives

Quotation C S Lewis I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun Quotes

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

source: - C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.229, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: God, Faith, Believe, Hope And Faith, Belive

[M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageousâ€”that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

Topics: Strong, Philosophy, Boys, Accustomed, Don't Waste Time

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

Topics: God, Christian, Thinking, Jesus Love, Christian Worship

The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.

Topics: Perfect, Church, Would Be, Church Service

Many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and... God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again

Topics: Gone, World, Made, Insisting

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Topics: Sympathy, Regret, Fear, Heaven And Death

To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.

Topics: Mean, Advice, Trying

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death.

Topics: Country, Desire, Alive

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.

Topics: Cost, Dangerous, Impulse, Treacherous, Dangerous Things

God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.

Topics: Perseverance, Hard Times, What Matters

The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.

Topics: Heart, Home, Heaven

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

Topics: Yoga, Soul, Body, Soul Healing, Soul Life

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

Topics: Men, Religion, Done

When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.

Topics: Blessed, Blessing, Christian Inspirational, Being Blessed, Count Your Blessings

He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.

Topics: Greatness Of God

When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.

Topics: Love, Marriage, Valentines Day, Great Marriage, Christian Marriage

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Topics: Love, Inspirational, Heart, Unbreakable, Captivating

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

Topics: Art, Taken, Mean, Mere Mortals, Merriment

The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.

Topics: Real, Dirty, Tests

My son, by all means desist from kicking the venerable and enlightened Vizier: for as a costly jewel retains its value even if hidden in a dung-hill, so old age and discretion are to be respected even in the vile persons of our subjects. Desist therefore, and tell us what you desire and propose.

Topics: Mean, Son, Jewels

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

Topics: Heart, Sleep, Dragons

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

Topics: Kindness, Love Is, Christianity, Grief Observed

Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

Topics: Life, Happiness, May, Lecturer, Great Christian

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.

Topics: Inspirational, Change, Inspiring, Time To Move On, Times Have Changed

The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become - because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. . .It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

Topics: Giving Up, Real, New Beginnings

God is love, and that love works through men-especially through the whole community of Christians.

Topics: Christian, Men, Community, Christian Love

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

source: - C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.84, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: God, Christian Inspirational, Feelings, God's Love, Feelings Come And Go

I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him.

Topics: Christian, Believe, Praying, Doings, Blessing To Others

On the back of Satan's neck is a nail scarred footprint.

Topics: Nails, Necks, Satan, Following Jesus, Blood Of Jesus

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

Topics: Forgiveness, Thinking, Forgiving, God Forgives, Tribunals

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

Topics: Life, Encouraging, Not Giving Up, Ordinary Person

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Topics: Love, Inspirational, Life, Inspirational Graduation, Kids Inspirational

God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.

Topics: First Love, Love Is, Soul

A Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent.

Topics: Christian, Men, Repent

Love as distinct from â€œbeing in loveâ€ is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit...

Topics: Being In Love, Love Is, Feelings

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

Topics: Life, Inspiring, Powerful, Integrity And Character, Integrity Character

The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth-- the very thing the whole story has been about.

Topics: Events, Stories, Earth

Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.

Topics: Men, Dying, Christ

I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.

Topics: Believe, Giving, Safe, Spares, Hamper

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Motivational

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

Topics: God, Atheist, Literature, Dejected, Great Divorce

Do not dare not to dare.

Topics: Life, Religion, Dare

We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely

Topics: Might, Matter, Might Have Been, Realm Of Possibility, Past Present Future

If one could run without getting tired I don't think one would often want to do anything else.

Topics: Running, Tired, Thinking, Getting Tired, Tired Of Life

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

Topics: Inspirational, Happiness, Religious, Peace And Happiness, Peace With God

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.

Topics: Truth, Views, Answers

Imagine yourself as a living house.

Topics: House, Imagine

No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

Topics: Joy, Missing, Soul, Great Divorce, Thy Will Be Done

It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men.

Topics: Men, Worship, Process, Worship The Lord, Christian Worship

To love is to be vulnerable....

Topics: Love You, Love Is, Vulnerable

Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?

Topics: Spiritual, Men, Forever

Holiness is irresistible. If even 10% of the world's population had it the whole world would be converted and happy before the year's end.

Topics: Faith, Inspiration, Years

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Topics: Strong, Sex, Children, Mud Pies, Desire For God

It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.

Topics: Nice, Cost, Rebellious, Crucifixion, Crucifixion Of Christ

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.

Topics: Heart, Animal, Broken

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

Topics: God, Wisdom, Atheist, Scribbles, Spiritual Darkness

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Topics: Art, Truth, Creativity, Literature And Art, Original Art

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

Topics: Book, Reading, Men

Joy is the serious business of heaven.

Topics: Marriage, Joy, Heaven, Merriment, Serious Business

I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

Topics: Love, Sad, Hurt, Hurt And Pain, I Was Hurt

God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

Topics: Pain, Stains, Tribulation, Without Pain, Parkinson

Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Trying, Too Deep

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

Topics: Real, Decay, Logic

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

Topics: Religion, Dirt

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

Topics: Reality, Mind, Done, Screwtape Letters

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Topics: Humorous, Kids, Boys

Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.

Topics: Jobs, Writing, Wonderful

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.

Topics: Intellectual, Religion, Slacker, Embarking

She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.

Topics: Sarcastic, Women, Expression, Live For Others, Unselfishness

If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.

Topics: Conceited, Men, Thinking

To the glistening eastern sea, I give you Queen Lucy the Valiant. To the great western woods, King Edmund the Just. To the radiant southern sun, Queen Susan the Gentle. And to the clear northern skies, I give you King Peter the Magnificent. Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia. May your wisdom grace us until the stars rain down from the heavens.

Topics: Kings, Stars, Queens, Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe, Lion Witch Wardrobe

Nothing is yet in its true form.

Topics: Truth, Mystery, Wonder, Till We Have Faces

I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.

Topics: Love, Sides, Narnia, Puddleglum

[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.

Topics: Faith, Men, Thinking, Revive, Screwtape Letters

Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.

Topics: Reading, Two, Eating

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

Topics: Religion, Trying, Succeed, Screwtape Letters

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Topics: Book, Writing, Made, Dictation

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing â€” to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from â€” my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

Topics: Country, Home, Thinking, Longing For Home, Till We Have Faces

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.

Topics: Mistake, Evil, Necessary Evil

We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.

Topics: Running, Horse, Want

I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.

Topics: Real, Thinking, Sick, Worthy Causes

Further up and further in!

I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.

Topics: Writing

You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.

Topics: Earth, Bows, Shame

The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

Topics: Veils, Rich, Myth

What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.

Topics: People, Religion, Share

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.

Topics: Hurt, Pain, Men, Self Will

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. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

Topics: Keys, Doors, Hands

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?

Topics: Faith, Religion, Answers, Till We Have Faces

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

Topics: Faith, Blessed, Inspiration

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.

source: - Source: www.hiphopcanada.com

Topics: Inspirational, Philosophy, Medicine, Perception Is Reality, Perception Reality

The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own.

Topics: Life, Universe

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.

Topics: Real, Writing, Interest, Imaginary Things, Real Things

I seemed to hear God saying, "Put down your gun and we'll talk.

Topics: Gun

Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him.

Topics: Prepared

You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.

Topics: Chosen One, Chosen, Christian Friends

Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. (And) There is no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Righ and Wrong are...

Topics: Mean, Men, Trying

Aslan's instructions always work; there are no exceptions.

Topics: Instruction, Exception

Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.

Topics: Children, Stories, Lions

In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.

Topics: Bakers, Treasure, Holmes, Baker Street

Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.

Topics: Differences, Sick, Brave

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.

Topics: Girl, Book, Reading, Lion Witch Wardrobe, Growing Old

But Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

Topics: Mean, Pride, Men

That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.

Topics: Religious, Believe, Mean

It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

Topics: Forget, About Yourself

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!

Topics: Country, Real, Home

Lucy looked and saw that Aslan had just breathed on the feet of the stone giant. It's all right!" shouted Aslan joyously. "Once The feet are put right, all the rest of him will follow.

Topics: Feet, Giants, Stones, Lucy

Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.

Topics: Sleep, Names, Voice

The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.

Topics: Giving, Needs, States, Abdication

A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility.

Topics: Attitude, Humility, Men

Where, except in the present, can the eternal be met?

Topics: Mets

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.

Topics: Hands, Vices, Want, Screwtape Letters

Remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.

Topics: Noble, World, Treasure

I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.

Topics: Atheist, Creating, Religion, Proof God Exists, Proof That God Exists

You have a traitor there, Aslan," said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking about himself after all he'd been through and after the talk he'd had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn't seem to matter what the Witch said.

Topics: Morning, Past, Thinking

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

Topics: God, Men, Ideas, Straight Lines, Apologetic

A dragon has just flown over the tree-tops and lighted on the beach. Yes, I am afraid it is between us and the ship. And arrows are no use against dragons. And they're not at all afraid of fire." "With your Majesty's leave-" began Reepicheep. "No, Reepicheep," said the King very firmly, "you are not to attempt a single combat with it.

Topics: Beach, Kings, Fire, Reepicheep, Tree Tops

Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.

Topics: Each Day, Becoming, Horror

How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

Topics: Dream, Stronger, Idiotic

The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.

Topics: Dream, Morning, Holiday

Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it.

Topics: Wisdom, Giving, Forever

The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred

Topics: Men, Self, Glimpse

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

Topics: God, Religion, World

Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.

Topics: Wisdom, Taken, Men, Provocation, Ill Tempered

We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

Topics: Men, Laughing, Honor, Shocked

We forgive, we mortify our resentment; a week later some chain of thought carries us back to the original offence and we discover the old resentment blazing away as if nothing had been done about it at all. We need to forgive our brother seventy times seven not only for 490 offences but for one offence.

Topics: Brother, Forgiving, Needs, Blazing, Offence

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

Topics: Believe, Men, Giving

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects--with their Christianity latent.

Topics: Christian, Book, Want, Latent

Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.

Topics: Player, Trying, Castles

For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.

Topics: Differences, Religion, Making A Difference, Judas

The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

Topics: Mean, Heart, Acceptance, Deep Desire, Chasms

Things never happen the same way twice.

Topics: Way, Narnia

The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds him liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.

Topics: Christian, Men, People

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

Topics: Enemy, Looks, Causes, Forsaken, Wormwood

I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.

Topics: Goodbye, Book, Night, Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe, Lion Witch Wardrobe

And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.

Topics: Sweet, Thinking, Lakes, Warm

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

Topics: Decision, Religion, Way

They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.

Topics: Taken, Mind, Belief

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of 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.

Topics: Morning, Doors, World

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

Topics: Men, Errors, Age

Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.

Topics: Real, Dark, Doors, Dark Room

Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.

Topics: Gains, Disability, Vocation

We want not so much a Father but a grandfather in heaven, a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?

Topics: Father, Long, Heaven

Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question "What on earth is he up to now?" will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.

Topics: Dog, Mean, Men

It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power -- it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.

Topics: Real, Law, Broken

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.

Topics: Heart, Tears, Firsts

In our adversity, God shouts to us.

Topics: Adversity

I am struck here by the curious mixture of justice and injustice in our lives. We are blamed for our real faults but usually not on the right occasions.

Topics: Real, Justice, Mixtures, Justice And Injustice

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

Topics: Wisdom, Philosophy, Goes On

If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love - You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.

Topics: Christian, Love You, Men, Unselfishness

Suspicion often creates what it suspects.

Topics: Suspicion

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.

Topics: Errors, Trying, Spirit, Venison, Receptive

The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question "Do you see the same truth?" would be "I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend," no Friendship can arise - though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.

Topics: White, Answers, Care

As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.

Topics: Thinking, Doe, May, Eros

Look for the valleys, the green places, and fly through them. There will always be a way through.

Topics: Valleys, Looks, Green

In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.

Topics: Giving, Desire, Needs

You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.

Topics: God Love, Creatures, Great Divorce

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

Topics: Men, Liberation, Compulsion, Softness, Divine Mercy

Virtue - even attempted virtue - brings light; indulgence brings fog.

Topics: Christian, Light, Fog

The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.

Topics: Letting Go, Giving, Trying

Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

Topics: Evil, Joy, Free Will

If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it's not so bad.

Topics: Thinking, Training, World, Corrections

He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart

Topics: Easter, Food, Heart

Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.

Topics: Kings, Queens, Narnia

There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.

Topics: Soul, Suffering, Limits, Till We Have Faces

Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.

Topics: Reality, Thinking, Feet

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

Topics: Wisdom, Grief, Talking, Grief Observed

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.

Topics: Beautiful, Voice, Sound

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

Topics: Heart, Should

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.

Topics: Lying, Made

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

Topics: Book, Wind, Long, Corridors, Attics

They did nothing wrong their time here has ended

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, "Here comes one who will augment our loves." For in this love "to divide is not to take away.

Topics: Real, Blessed, Jealous, Jealous Love, Newcomers

Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different...

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Change, Things Have Changed, Nothing Ever Changes

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

Topics: World, May, Tricks, Swordsman

The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self changed into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One's most private wishes, one's point of view, are the things that have to be changed.

Topics: Christian, Self, Views

One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.

source: - C. S. Lewis (2010). “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, p.21, HarperCollins UK

Topics: Eye, People, Ordinary, Ordinary People, Cowardly

Aslan: You doubt your value. Don't run from who you are.

Topics: Running, Doubt, Who You Are

He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand.

Topics: Hands, Want, Walks

What do they teach them at these schools?

Topics: School, Narnia, Teach

Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that "suits" him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.

Topics: Men, Church, Next, Connoisseur, Screwtape Letters

We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.

Topics: Prayer, Earnestness

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Topics: Reading, Eye, Night, Moral Action, Night Sky

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

Topics: Fear, Grief, Yawning, Inspirational Grief, Inspirational Grieving

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.

Topics: Thinking, Rescue, Wrong Road, Right Road, Great Divorce

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

Topics: Grief, Grieving, Sky, Stillbirth, Empty Houses

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.

Topics: Marriage, Real, Impact, Inspirational Marriage, Closeness

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

Topics: Grief, Long, Valleys, Grief Observed

Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.

Topics: Joy, Elements, Praise

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

Topics: Wisdom, Eternity, Childishness

Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

Topics: Dark, Blood, Water, Till We Have Faces, Holy Places

Topics: Wisdom, Grief, Yawning

Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time.

Topics: Time, Errors, Sin

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?

Topics: Home, Thinking, Looks

No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'.

Topics: Philosophical, Heaven, Religion, Genesis, Heaven And Earth

There are no ordinary people.. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.

Topics: People, Religion, Atheism, Mere Mortals, Ordinary People

The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike...Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.

Topics: Law, Ideas, Atheism, Subjectivism

Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it.

Topics: Nice, House, Atheism

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