CS Lewis Quotes

He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.

The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose.

Give vocational training to the manually minded, and the children's courts of the future will have less to do.

Sentence first, verdict afterwards.

It matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth.

We come to Scripture not to learn a subject but to steep ourselves in a person.

When you have reached your own room, be kind to those Who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.

Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.

If conversion makes no improvements in a man's outward actions then I think his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.

...those serpents! There's no pleasing them!

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.

You do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but you have lost love because you never attempted obedience.

If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit.

He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

Happiness isn't wanting what you can get, but wanting what you have.

Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side.

The full acting out of the self's surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination

I don't deal at all well with the relative amount of stuff I have to face already.

Holiness is irresistible. If even 10% of the world's population had it the whole world would be converted and happy before the year's end.

Reeling and Writhing of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied, 'and the different branches of arithmetic-ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision.

The rule is: we cannot really forgive ourselves unless we look at the failure in our past and call it by its right name.

You are a black goddess when you come out the salon.

The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.

History-writing is not a visit of condolence.

True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.

How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don't?

If things are real, they're there all the time.

There is only one way fit for a man - Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.

Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.

Falling in love is something that happens to us, being is love is something we do. No passion is self preservatory.

There is zero evidence for god.

We're all mad here.

if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.

When you get in the pocket, there is a place where the music begins to play itself. When you can find that spot, it's the best feeling in the world.

Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?

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

If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.

A great book is a homing device For navigating paradise. A good book somehow makes you care About the comfort of a chair. A bad book owes to many trees A forest of apologies.

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one.

Let me explain my job very simply: My job is to line up five, seven, 10 yards in front of a man and run into him at full speed.

Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places.

Rereading a favorite novel first read 5, 10, or 20 years ago, is a measure of our travel, how far we've come; it's a way of visiting an earlier self.

"The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!" "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it."

Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.

There might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death.

Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.

The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye).

This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.

Sometimes I think I take on a lot of work but that's me.