C. S. Lewis Life Quotations

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

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

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

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.

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

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.

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

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Do not dare not to dare.

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.

Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.

We may think God wants actions of a certain kind, but God wants people of a certain kind.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

Christian love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself

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

This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there’s a rumor going around the shop that some of us are someday going to come to life.

I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one.

Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.

We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows.

The New Testament writers speak as if Christ's achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the 'first fruits,' the pioneer of life,' He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so.

The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own.

He who has not forgiven an enemy has never yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.

Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death.

War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.

A Christian is not someone who never goes wrong, but one who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin again, because the Christ-life is inside him.

Every day in a life fills the whole life with expectations and memory.

The beauty of life, is that you don't have to be modernly beautiful to live it.

Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.

A God. The God. One word can make all the difference in the world.

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.

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.