C. S. Lewis Quotations | Page 3

Joy is the serious business of heaven.

Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it.

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power.

God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved… Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.

I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him.

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

Before we can be cured, we must want to be cured.

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.

Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.

You can't analyze God. He is too awesome, too big, too mysterious,

No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair.

It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good.

The humblest praise most, while cranks & malcontents praise least. Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible

Q. What is your view of the daily discipline of the Christian life - the need for taking time to be alone with God? Lewis: "We have our New Testament regimental orders upon the subject. I would take it for granted that everyone who becomes a Christian would undertake this practice. It is enjoined upon us by Our Lord; and since they are his commands, I believe in following them. It is always just possible that Jesus Christ meant what he said when He told us to seek the secret place and to close the door.

God loves us NOT because we're lovable, because He is love. Not because He needs to receive, because He delights to give.

Don't shine so that others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see HIM.

Forgive us as we forgive- we are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse Gods mercy for ourselves.

God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.

Everything that is not eternal is worthless in eternity.

We shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.

The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words 'true' or 'false'.

When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.

You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.

You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

True faith is never found alone; it is accompanied by expectation.

In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.

Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.

God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.

If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic -- to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them.

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.

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

And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back--if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?

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.

Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

Delight is incomplete until it is expressed.

Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good - above all, that we are better than someone else - I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil.

Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.

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

If one could run without getting tired I don't think one would often want to do anything else.

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.... The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.

God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us.

Disobedience to conscience makes conscience blind.

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.

Don't think of God in terms of forms, because forms are limited and God is unlimited.

I wonder if people who asked for God to intervene in our world, really know what they are asking. Will they want to be there when God really does intervene?

For the church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ, in which all members, however different, (and He rejoices in their differences and by no means wishes to iron them out) must share the common life, complementing and helping one another precisely by their differences.

Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.

Die before you die, there is no chance after.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

A man can't be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it.

God wants a child's heart and a grownup's head.

But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.

Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in

I don't pray so that I can change God. I pray so that God can change me.

On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.

One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realize your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.

If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. It cuts its own throat.

Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters...

Christ says, 'Give me all. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you....Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked- the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you myself: my own will shall become yours.

The surest way of spoiling a pleasure [is] to start examining your satisfaction.

Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.

I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to "rejoice" as much as by anything else

All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning...Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.

Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.

It's no use telling us that something was 'mysterious' or 'loathsome' or 'awe-inspiring' or 'voluptuous.' By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim, 'how mysterious!' or 'loathsome' or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react.

We have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

We treat our dogs as if they were "almost human": that is why they really become "almost human" in the end.

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 heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens - at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.

Humility is self-forgetfulness.

The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.

Christ, who said to the disciples, 'You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.'

You must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give.

If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time.