Words matter. These are the best C. S. Lewis Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
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.
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.
‘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.’
Writing is like a ‘lust,’ or like ‘scratching when you itch.’ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.
Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.
Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
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.
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.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
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.
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.
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
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.
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.
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.
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
History isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.
When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you’d been the only man in the world.
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.
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.
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.’
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
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.
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.
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
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.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
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 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.
It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
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.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.
There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.
