C. S. Lewis Ideas Quotations

The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other...

I think we must attack -- wherever we meet it -- the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true.

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

Now we cannot...discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going tobring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't.

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.

The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed.

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.

I want God, not my idea of God.

The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike...Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.

The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development--

The idea which...shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience.

The Christian "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection

...this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.

The Christian idea of 'putting on Christ' is the whole of Christianity.

On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, . . . they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

You have no idea what an appetite it gives one, being executed.

Yes, I know,' interrupted Puddleglum. 'And few return to the sunlit lands. You needn't say it again. You are a chap of one idea, aren't you?

Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to believe in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it.

Wouldn't he know without being asked?' said Polly. 'I've no doubt he would,' said the Horse (still with his mouth full). 'But I've a sort of an idea he likes to be asked.

You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.

If you don't listen to theology, that won't mean you have no ideas about God, it will mean you have a lot of wrong ones.