C. S. Lewis Quotations | Page 2

For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.

Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.

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

An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. [speaking of George MacDonald]

...here also forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or bullying. But if that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. (This doesn't mean that you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart - every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out.)

God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.

Many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and... God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher. He'd be either a lunatic on a level with a man who says he's a poached egg or else he'd be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.

On the back of Satan's neck is a nail scarred footprint.

God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.

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

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

Continue seeking God with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.

When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.

We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms.

To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.

He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.

You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring into his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest "well pleased".

If we only have the will to walk, then God is pleased with our stumbles.

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

But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.

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.

We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely

When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.

The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become - because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. . .It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.

The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth-- the very thing the whole story has been about.

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

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

God, in the end, gives people what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair?

If anyone would like to acquire humility, the first step is to realize one is proud. Nothing can be done before it.

The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.

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

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

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.

It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.

A clever arrangement of bad eggs will never make a good omelet.

God doesn't want something from us. He simply wants us.

And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.

Have fun, even if it’s not the same kind of fun everyone else is having.

Love as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit...

I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

God is not a static thing...but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.

A Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent.

Nothing is really ours until we share it.

The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.

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.

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

The value of the individual does not lie in him. He receives it by union with Christ.

It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.

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 do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.

It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.

There is someone that I love even though I don't approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is......me.

Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.

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

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all ...

When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.

Do not dare not to dare.

The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality. . . asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me.

You must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best

When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.

[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not.

When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others—not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.

With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.

It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It's not the sort of comfort they supply there.

Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they 'own' their bodies—those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!

The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.

In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people's, we do not accept them easily enough.

Precisely because we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments.

You'll never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking what sort of impression you make.

It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men.

True friends don’t spend time gazing into each other’s eyes. They may show great tenderness towards each other but they face in the same direction - toward common projects, goals - above all, towards a common Lord.

Jesus produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

When we are wholly His we will be more ourselves than ever.

Forgiveness does not mean excusing.

If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.