C. S. Lewis famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
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When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only person in the world.
-- C. S. Lewis -
The doors of hell are locked from the inside!
-- C. S. Lewis -
It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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The humblest praise most, while cranks & malcontents praise least. Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible
-- C. S. Lewis -
There is someone that I love even though I don't approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is......me.
-- C. S. Lewis -
The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one's life.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't.
-- C. S. Lewis -
God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.
-- C. S. Lewis -
God wants a child's heart and a grownup's head.
-- C. S. Lewis -
There is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and he wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
-- 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 -
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.
-- C. S. Lewis -
I don't pray so that I can change God. I pray so that God can change me.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life's short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily
-- 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 -
When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world. The wartime posters told us that Careless Talk costs Lives. It is equally true that Careless Lives cost Talk. Our careless lives set the outer world talking; and we give them grounds for talking in a way that throws doubt on the truth of Christianity itself.
-- C. S. Lewis -
If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Christ, who said to the disciples, 'You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.'
-- C. S. Lewis -
Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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And the seriousness with which the other party takes my words always raises the doubt whether I have taken them seriously enough myself.
-- C. S. Lewis -
God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Provocation doesn't make me ill-tempered: it only shows me how ill-tempered I am.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.
-- 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 -
The value of the individual does not lie in him. He receives it by union with Christ.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Literary Experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.. .Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost or you wouldn't have come where you now are.
-- C. S. Lewis -
I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to "rejoice" as much as by anything else
-- C. S. Lewis -
Don't shine so that others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see HIM.
-- C. S. Lewis -
The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.
-- C. S. Lewis -
One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.
-- C. S. Lewis -
For the church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ, in which all members, however different, (and He rejoices in their differences and by no means wishes to iron them out) must share the common life, complementing and helping one another precisely by their differences.
-- C. S. Lewis -
When golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift?
-- C. S. Lewis -
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You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.
-- C. S. Lewis -
We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect but how we should pray being as we now are ... It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters...
-- C. S. Lewis -
If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must think of God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.
-- C. S. Lewis -
If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that his operations will often appear to us far from beneficent and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give him our confidence in spite of this.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.
-- C. S. Lewis -
To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death -- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Precisely because we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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Disobedience to conscience makes conscience blind.
-- C. S. Lewis -
On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
-- C. S. Lewis -
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
-- C. S. Lewis -
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'
-- C. S. Lewis -
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We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
-- C. S. Lewis -
You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
-- C. S. Lewis -
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
-- C. S. Lewis -
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
-- C. S. Lewis -
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
-- C. S. Lewis -
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
-- C. S. Lewis -
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
-- C. S. Lewis -
What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
-- C. S. Lewis -
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
-- C. S. Lewis -
If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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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 -
We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
-- C. S. Lewis -
A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
-- C. S. Lewis -
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.
-- C. S. Lewis -
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.
-- C. S. Lewis -
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
-- C. S. Lewis -
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.
-- C. S. Lewis -
That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.
-- C. S. Lewis -
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