Quotations by C. S. Lewis

Quotations | Speeches | Poetry

C. S. Lewis, British writer and scholar

Clive Staples "Jack" Lewis (29 November 1898 - 22 November 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis, was a British writer and scholar. He was born in Belfast, United Kingdom, on November 29, 1898. Lewis's works are diverse and include medieval literature, Christian apologetics, literary criticism, radio broadcasts, essays on Christianity, and fiction relating to the fight between good and evil. Examples of Lewis's fiction include The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy. C.S. Lewis died on November 22, 1963 - the same day that the American President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the author Aldous Huxley died. (Source: Wikipedia)

Quotations

C. S. Lewis
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
  4. Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
  5. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
  6. An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
  7. Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
  8. Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
  9. Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
  10. 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."
  11. 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.
  12. Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
  13. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
  14. 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.
  15. Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
  16. Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
  17. Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!"
  18. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
  19. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
  20. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
  21. How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
  22. Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
  23. 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.
  24. I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
  25. I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
  26. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
  27. If we could know which of us, darling, would be the first to go, who would be first to breast the swelling tide and step alone upon the other side - if we could know!
  28. 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.
  29. 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?
  30. 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.
  31. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely 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.
  32. It is hard to have patience with people who say "There is no death" or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
  33. It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
  34. 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.
  35. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
  36. Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
  37. 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.
  38. Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
  39. 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.
  40. Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
  41. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
  42. No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
  43. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
  44. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
  45. 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.
  46. Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
  47. Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
  48. 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.
  49. The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
  50. The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
  51. The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
  52. The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
  53. The safest road to hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
  54. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
  55. 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."
  56. There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
  57. 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.
  58. This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
  59. 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.
  60. We are what we believe we are.
  61. What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
  62. What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
  63. 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.
  64. With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
  65. You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
  66. You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
  67. You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

 

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