CS Lewis Quotes

Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.

When golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift?

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

The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.

There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them.

What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.

In a civilization like ours, I feel that everyone has to come to terms with the claims of Jesus Christ upon his life, or else be guilty of inattention or of evading the question.

Sexual appetite, like any other appetite, grows by indulgence

It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.

Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?

The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.

Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot form their faces like barbedlightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expressioncould easily be mistaken for ferocity.

The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection.

We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or child.

Prosperity knits a man to the world.

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous.

Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.

The New Testament does not envisage solitary religion; regular assembly for worship is everywhere in the epistles.

I think it very wrong to pray for people while they are in distress and then not to continue praying, now with thanksgiving, when they are relieved.

People who know a lot of the same things can hardly help talking about them.

The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.

One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.

It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself-to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed.

Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.

God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous

The Beatles are dying in the wrong order.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.

A man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.

[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.

There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.

They tell me, Lord, that when I seem To be in speech with you. Since but one voice is heard, it

The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper.

The only thing Christianity can not be...is moderately important.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

If you're 70th or 80th on the money list, it's not very motivating.

A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can't put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover.

The old field of space, time, matter, and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not.

If you simply try to tell the truth you will, nine times out of ten, be original without ever having noticed it.

The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind.

Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, "I am what I do.

Progress means movement in a desired direction, and we do not all desire the same things for our species.

Well,' said Ransom, 'if it is a delusion, it's a pretty stubborn one.

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves... The modern world in comparison, ignores it.

If you have a religion it must be cosmic.

Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly.

The leading cause of death is birth.

I cannot understand how a man can appear in print claiming to disbelieve everything that he presupposes when he puts on the surplice. I feel it is a form of prostitution.