C. S. Lewis

Quotes

• “Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospel...”
• “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 t...”
• “To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personalit...”
• “But the man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delica...”
• “I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us...”
• “But what of the poor Ghosts who never get into the omnibus at all?' 'Everyone who wishes it does. Never fear. There are ...”
• “You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yours...”
• “I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people - all the people who believe ad...”
• “For what comes is Judgment: happy are those whom it finds labouring in their vocations, whether they were merely going o...”
• “The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns...”
• “He [the devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs-pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lo...”
• “Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards agai...”
• “If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads ...”
• “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a secon...”
• “This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in...”
• “Wisdom: The first error is that of the southern people, and it consists in holding that these eastern and western places...”
• “We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled dea...”
• “If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things -...”
• “The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is ...”
• “What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as th...”
• “It comes, it comes!' they sang. 'Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.' One dreadful glance over my shoulder I e...”
• “[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will ...”
• “... in such a matter he would never have been guided by his first thoughts (which would probably have been right) nor ev...”
• “Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?" "Hush," he said sternly. "Do not blas...”
• “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to y...”
• “I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call ob...”
• “In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking Go...”
• “And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and, oh, gloriously she did) it was for anothe...”
• “The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesth...”
• “What can you ever really know of other people's souls - of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One ...”
• “Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some in...”
• “Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up - p...”
• “The Guide sang: The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, And fools crying, Because it has begun It will cont...”
• “I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is t...”
• “Although Rick Warren's quote in 2002 is the one most often misattributed to Lewis, two very similar quotes predate Warre...”
• “Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose if one were forbidd...”
• “He [God] lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and th...”
• “The hatefulness of a hated person is "real"-in hatred you see men as they are; you are disillusioned; but the loveliness...”
• “There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the...”
• “I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that a...”
• “When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He woul...”
• “Variant: "The only people who object to escapism are jailers." Mistakenly attributed solely to Lewis by Arthur C. Clarke...”
• “The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not "influence" as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was...”
• “At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the mo...”
• “We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong...”
• “The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were danger...”
• “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought mos...”
• “What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man's conquest of him...”
• “My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of h...”
• “As C. S. Lewis said to me long ago, more or less - (I do not suppose my memory of his dicta is any more precisely accura...”