C. S. Lewis Quotations

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

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

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

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.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

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

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. 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, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.

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

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

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

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.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.

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

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.

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.

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

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

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.

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.

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.

'Good English' is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.

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.

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.

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?

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

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

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

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.

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

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

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.

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

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.

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

We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ.

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.

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them.

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.

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.

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

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

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

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

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

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

'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.'

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

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.

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.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

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

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.

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

Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.

Of course, I quiet agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable discomfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is one thing you cannot get looking for it. If you look for the 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 with and the in the end, despair.

Child, that is why all the rest are now a horror to her. That is what happens to those who pluck and eat fruits at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Oh, the fruit is good, but they loath it ever after.

He (the devil) always sends errors into the world in pairs--pairs of opposites...He relies on your extra dislike of one to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.

Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.

A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.

If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.

To forgive the incessant provocations of daily life - to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son - how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night, “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what he says.

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.

The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.

I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.

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?

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.