CS Lewis Quotes

They Open A Door And Enter A World

I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.

Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.

Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life.

The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle.

Total war is the most humane in the long run.

Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe.

A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid.

The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus in a woman's body.

When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.

Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.

Morality or duty never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.

There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.

All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.

Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.

The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though the world might last a hundred years.

Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue.

A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food.

You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity.

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.

Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.

People blush at praise--not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs.

To fight in another man's armour is something more than to be influenced by his style of fighting.

If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.

If the universe is so bad...how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?

If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally.

The 'frankness' of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.

Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask.

If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?

An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath.

Though I do not believe that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.

You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter.

There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.

The true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality.

Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death.

Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control.

To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us.

You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to 'know of the doctrine'.

We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument...Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.

The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe.

In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.

We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.

Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.