C.S. Lewis Quotes

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.
C. S. Lewis

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
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

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C. S. Lewis

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
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

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man just a cleverer devil.
C. S. Lewis

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.
C. S. Lewis

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C. S. Lewis

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
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

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.
C. S. Lewis

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
C. S. Lewis

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
C. S. Lewis

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Oh, all right then- have it your way!'
C. S. Lewis

Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.
C. S. Lewis, 'The Pilgrim's Regress'

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
C. S. Lewis, A preface to "Paradise Lost"

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
C. S. Lewis

If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, also we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for another world.
C. S. Lewis,

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

People often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
C. S. Lewis

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
C. S. Lewis

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
C. S. Lewis

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those, we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
C. S. Lewis

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, and irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
C. S. Lewis

No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.
C. S. Lewis

The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law that overarches rulers and ruled alike.
C. S. Lewis

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
C.S. Lewis,

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
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

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
C. S. Lewis

I believe in God like I believe in the sun, not because I can see it, but because of it all things are seen.
C. S. Lewis

A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.
C. S. Lewis

A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional... values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.
C. S. Lewis

This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people.
C. S. Lewis

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.
C. S. Lewis

Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.
C. S. Lewis

Pride is a spiritual Cancer: It eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
C. S. Lewis

When you reach the thing you were desiring, if it doesn't satisfy you, it was not what you were desiring.
C. S. Lewis

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You do have a body.
C. S. Lewis

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

Nothing is beautiful except the abnormal; and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm.
C. S. Lewis