C.S. Lewis

Quotes

• “And above all, you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling…the ...”
• “I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, no...”
• “Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true ...”
• “Of the things that followed I cannot say at all whether they were what men call dream. And for all I can tell, the only ...”
• “and yet…' he said, 'and yet, father, I am terribly afraid. I am afraid that the things the Landlord really intends for m...”
• “There was certainly plenty to watch and listen to. The tree which Digory had noticed was now a full-grown beech whose br...”
• “You must make your choice: either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shu...”
• “And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this centr...”
• “Then Caspian caught up a battle-axe and rushed upon the Lord Drinian to kill him, and Drinian stood still as a stock for...”
• “For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers...”
• “If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand year...”
• “Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities...”
• “No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerl...”
• “Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to...”
• “This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we--even our poets and music...”
• “The causes of this distribution I do not know; but from our present point of view it ought to be clear that the real pro...”
• “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about...”
• “Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we rceive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. ...”
• “Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery ...”
• “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to y...”
• “We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants ...”
• “The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy p...”
• “The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them ...”
• “When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, wh...”
• “The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Ch...”
• “In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and be...”
• “Even if the two lovers are mature and experienced people who know that broken hearts heal in the end and can clearly for...”
• “Women sometimes have the problem of trying to judge by artificial light how a dress will look by daylight. That is very ...”
• “The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of t...”
• “I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course - or I intended it to have - a moral. But the transmo...”
• “And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience...”
• “The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little p...”
• “Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the ...”
• “The Divine "goodness" differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different; it differs from ours not as white from black, ...”
• “Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward doe...”
• “If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will - that is, for making a live world in...”
• “Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. Fo...”
• “We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the ...”
• “Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. ... We never find out the strength of the evil impulse in...”
• “One of the drawbacks about adventures is that when you come to the most beautiful places you are often too anxious and h...”
• “And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off fro...”
• “I who know many present things by my art," replied the Hermit with a smile, "have yet little knowledge of things future....”
• “Though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like...”
• “If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that thou...”
• “You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is th...”
• “The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. T...”
• “Do you think I care if Aslan dooms me to death?” said the King. “That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be ...”
• “And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a...”
• “In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for t...”
• “Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stom...”