CS Lewis Quotes

The right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge.

We must get over wanting to be needed.

I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was "Feed my sheep", not "Try experiments on my rats", or even "Teach my performing dogs new tricks".

Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there'd be no difficulty.

Hatred obscures all distinctions.

Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. . . youth's characteristic chronological snobbery.

Besides reasoning about matters of fact, men also make moral judgements.

When we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

Girls aren't very good at keeping maps in their brains", said Edmund, "That's because we've got something in them", replied Lucy.

Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.

A myth is a lie that conveys a truth.

Of course it should be pointed out that, though all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that he cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted him in this life.

It's always winter but it's never Christmas.

Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one.

'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'.

Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices.

If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.

Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also.

Human intellect is incurably abstract.

The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

Every object you see before you at this moment -the walls, ceiling, and furniture, the book, your own washed hands and cut fingernails, bears witness to the colonization of Nature of Reason.

If we continue to make moral judgements (and whatever we say shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of nature.

The longest way round is the shortest way home

God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.

There seems no plan because it is all plan.

It's like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.

Aslan" said Lucy "you're bigger". "That is because you are older, little one" answered he. "Not because you are?" "I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger".

Will the others see you too?" asked Lucy. "Certainly not at first," said Aslan. "Later on, it depends." "But they won’t believe me!" said Lucy. "It doesn’t matter.

No man who says, 'I'm as good as you,' believes it. He would not say it if he did.

You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.

In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Lucifer] could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige.

No time for better words, no time to unsay anything. -Til We Have Faces

you had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words.

In the name of the Fathers, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes-I mean Amen.

Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? WEll, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments).

Every joy is beyond all others.

Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

Do not look sad. We shall meet soon again." "Please, Aslan", said Lucy,"what do you call soon?" "I call all times soon" said Aslan; and instantly he was vanished away.

You all know," said the Guide, "that security is mortals' greatest enemy.

If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.

Gone! And you and I quite crestfallen. It’s always like that, you can’t keep him; it’s not as if he were a tame lion.

Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place – to one friend rather than another and one shire more that all the land.

Things always work according to their nature.

You die and die and then you are beyond death.

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.

Beloved," said the Glorious One, "unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.

And what about you? You must be some kind of beardless dwarf?...You mean to say, that you're a daughter of Eve?...Y-yes, but, you are in fact... human?

It's so large" "It's the world dear, did you think it'd be small?" "smaller

Very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.