C. S. Lewis quotes:

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  • You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

  • The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

  • Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

  • 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.'

  • What I call my 'self' now is hardly a person at all. It's mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.

  • Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

  • No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

  • Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

  • Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us... While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

  • Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.

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

  • Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

  • Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

  • Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

  • 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.

  • An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

  • This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

  • Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

  • I'm tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.

  • You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

  • 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.

  • The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

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

  • 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.

  • If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

  • Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

  • The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'

  • A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

  • When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you'd been the only man in the world.

  • Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

  • The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

  • I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

  • There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.

  • Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.

  • Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

  • I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

  • Grief gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

  • One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters.

  • He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.

  • The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose, and that is to support the ultimate career.

  • We do not want merely to see beautywe want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.

  • this is a book about something

  • Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.

  • I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that?

  • When we carry out our religious duties we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last water comes, it may find them ready.

  • Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.

  • And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to do another and harder and better one.

  • In our world, said Eustace, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.

  • The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.

  • The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)

  • The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.

  • The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

  • No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

  • Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which grow up ten years later into domestic hatred.

  • The general rule which we have pretty much established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are 'real' while the spiritual elements are 'subjective'; in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality and to ignore them is to be an escapist.

  • All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!" Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.

  • The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?

  • I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.

  • Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad.

  • We (modern society) make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

  • We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."

  • While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend."

  • Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already"

  • Whatever else humanism is, it is emphatically not a movement towards freedom and expansion. It is the impulse of men who feel themselves simple, rustic, and immature, towards sophistication, urbanity, and ripeness. In a word, it is the most complete opposite we can find to the Romantic desire for the primitive and the spontaneous."

  • All the rabbit in us is to disappear-the worried, conscientious, ethical rabbit as well as the cowardly and sensual rabbit. We shall bleed and squeal as the handfuls of fur come out; and then, surprisingly, we shall find underneath it a thing we have never yet imagined: a real Man, an ageless god, a son of God, strong, radiant, wise, beautiful, and drenched in joy."

  • How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?"

  • I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?"

  • I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words."

  • Life...is as habit forming as cocaine."

  • 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 begin over again after each stumble--because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out." - Mere Christianity"

  • The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.

  • Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.

  • The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.

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

  • Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

  • Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

  • Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different...

  • We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.

  • He didn't call his father and mother 'Father' and 'Mother' but Harold and Alberta. They were very up to date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers, and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

  • The death of a beloved is an amputation.

  • When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes

  • When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft. Protestantism,in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being too much like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.

  • There is one bit of advice given us by the ancient Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest; and lending money at interest - what we call investment - is the basis of our whole system.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Through pride the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every vice, it's the complete anti-God state of mind.

  • There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.

  • I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to "rejoice" as much as by anything else

  • For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

  • Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity, which, in spite of its divisions, it has never lost. I trembled on recognizing the same unmistakable aroma coming from the writings of Dante and Bunyan, Thomas Aquinas and William Law.

  • For they (art and music) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

  • The only way to drive out bad culture is to create good culture. We need to recognize that artistic talent is a gift from the Lord - and that developing those talents is the only way to create good culture.

  • Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.

  • Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted---i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk---don't keep on looking at it.

  • You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

  • We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.

  • 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.

  • Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.

  • We 'have all we want' is a terrible saying when 'all' does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, 'God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full - there's nowhere for Him to put it.'

  • Every poet and musician and artist, but for grace, is drawn away from love of the things he tells to love of the telling...

  • It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

  • Badness is only spoiled goodness.

  • When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.

  • Goodness is, so to speak, itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.

  • In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.

  • Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.

  • A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live; a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go: to stay here is death.

  • There are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid and disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine because that is how God loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but He delights to give.

  • I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. It doesn't change God - it changes me.

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