CS Lewis Quotes

Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.

The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard.

I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.

Other than heaven, the only place where one's heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell.

Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.

If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.

Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.

I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it.

I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself.

Watchin' and listenin' is the thing at present; not talking.

Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'.

War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.

Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.

Because God created the Natural - invented it out of His love and artistry - it demands our reverence.

We long for more and God's promise is that there is more awaiting us. More to delight us than we will ever exhaust.

A man who first tried to guess 'what the public wants,' and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave

Autumn is really the best of the seasons

Why should your heart not dance?

Every day in a life fills the whole life with expectations and memory.

The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back to the simple principles, which we're so anxious not to see.

I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.

And this is the marvel of marvels; that he called me Beloved.

If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons' schools, the history of education would be very different.

Sometimes fairy stories may say best what's to be said.

Joy is the serious business of heaven. Our merriment must be between people who take each other seriously.

The best fruits are plucked for each by some hand that is not his own.

One is sometimes glad not to be a great theologian; one might easily mistake it for being a good Christian.

I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given.

The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four.

For He (God) seems to do nothing of himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures.

If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.

The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story.

Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.

Everywhere, except in theology, there has been a vigorous growth of skepticism about skepticism itself.

[Something] does not rise to the dignity of error.

Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body-different from one another and each contributing what no other could.

God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.

You people have no imagination!

It is a dreadful truth that the state of having to depend solely on God is what we all dread most.... It is good of Him to force us; but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time.

What one must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation.

Friendship is born at that moment when a single particular person claims to a different: 'What! You far too? I assumed I was the only real one particular.

It is often little things that are hardest to stand.

An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.

I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

Never exaggerate. Never say more than you really mean.

To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this.

But however happy you are feeling, you can't talk with your mouth full of snow.

Agnostics talk cheerfully of man's search for God but they might as well talk about the mouse's search for the cat.