C.S. Lewis Quotes

Biography

Type: Novelist, Scholar, Broadcaster

Born: 29 November 1898,Belfast, Ireland

Died: 22 November 1963 (aged 64),Oxford, England

Clive Stales Lewis was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Born on 29th November 1898, he was widely known for his fictional work especially books such as "The Chronicles of Narnia", "The Space Trilogy" and many others. His friends and family called him Jack though. He was a writer, poet, essayist and analyst.

C.S. Lewis Quotes

No people find each other more absurd than lovers

Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for
The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.

She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.

The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own.

We are what we believe we are!

I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

Nothing is yet in its true form.

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

You can make anything by writing.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

You can make anything out of writing.

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see... I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.

Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.

Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.

Like all philosophers, Aristotle gives words the definitions which will be most useful for his own purpose

Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.

And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.

The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. They cannot sound otherwise to those who have not had the relevant experience: that is why there is no real teaching of such truths possible and every generation starts from scratch.

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it.

Adventures are never fun while you're having them.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life God is sending one day by day.

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

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!

You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.

Do not dare not to dare.

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!

You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self-all your wishes and precautions-to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call "ourselves," to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be "good.

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.

All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.

We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.

Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.

The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.

In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth - only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.

Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.

Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.

The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.

If there is a wasp in the room, I’d like to be able to see it.

An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. [speaking of George MacDonald]

I do not expect old heads on young shoulders.

The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment...

As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.

If you want religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity. I am certain there must be a patent American article on the market which will suit you far better, but I can't give any advice on it.

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

The death of a beloved is an amputation.

They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.

It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as wel say that birth doesn’t matter.

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day."

(Epitaph for Joy Gresham)

Once very near the end I said, 'If you can - if it is allowed - come to me when I too am on my death bed.' 'Allowed!' she said. 'Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I'd break it into bits.

The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back - to be sucked back - into it?

Do you think I care if Aslan doomes me to death?” said the King. “That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.

How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, 'I am at peace with God.' She smiled, but not at me. Poi si torno all' eterna fontana.

[Death] is a safety-device because, once Man has fallen, natural immortality would be the one utterly hopeless destiny for him.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted-i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk-don't keep on looking at it.

For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.

He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.

Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

I seemed to hear God saying, "Put down your gun and we'll talk.

What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?

I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.

They call him Aslan in That Place," said Eustace.
"What a curious name!"
"Not half so curious as himself," said Eustace solemnly.

God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.

Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?

Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.

In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.

Then Hwin, though shaking all over, gave a strange little neigh and trotted across to the Lion.

"Please," she said, "you're so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I'd sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Something of God... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

Even if there were pains in Heaven, all who understand would desire them.

We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.

Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector.

God doesn't foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it.

Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would he also be "reasonable" [...]

When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamor of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

I have come," said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.

But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history - that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires.

You can't know, you can only believe - or not.

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.

A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.

we (modern society) make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

…the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects, we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

the difference between the old and the new education being) in a word, the old was a kind of propagation - men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

Planning has no magic whereby you can elicit figs from thistles or choke-pears from vines. The rich, sappy, fruit-laden tree will bear sweetness, and strength and spiritual health: the dry, prickly, withered tree will teach hate, jealousy, suspicion, and inferiority complex – whatever you TELL it to teach.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...

You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you," said the Lion.

Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.

But very quickly they all became grave again: for, as you know, there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects-with their Christianity latent.

Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.

But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.

A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all - and more amusing.

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?

Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to believe in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it.

The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.

The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong.

A Pagan is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. The post-Christian man differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin.

Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see.

All science is based on observation: all our observations are taken DURING Humpty Dumpty's fall, because we were born after he lost his seat on the wall and shall be extinct long before he reaches the ground.

The experience of a miracle means we must recognize that the data offered by our senses recur in regular pattern.

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?

Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

All that we call human history-money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

When we mention our personal opinions we must always make quite clear the difference between them and the Faith itself . . .

You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the 'best' people, the 'right' food, the 'important' books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.

Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about.

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

I was with book, as a woman is with child.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.

Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.

لا أتخيل أن هناك من يستمتع جداً بكتاب .. ويقرأه مرة واحدة !!ـ

It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.

There are far better things ahead than we leave behind.

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

The English... are the most deplorable milksops. They are creatures of that miserable sort who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door.

For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.

We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

In the twinkling of an eye, in a time too small to be measured, and in any place, all that seems to divide us from God can flee away, vanish, leaving us naked before Him, like the first man, like the only man, as if nothing but He and I existed.

Now it is time!" then louder, "Time!"; and then so loud it could have shaken the stars; "TIME." The door flew open.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

I knew the world too well to believe this sudden smiling. (…) The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.

Revolutions often perpetuate the old evil under a new name.

A society which is predominantly Christian will propagate Christianity: One which is not, will not. We have, in the long run, little either to hope or to fear from government.

We are defending Christianity; not "my religion". When we mention our personal opinions we must always make quite clear the difference between them and the Faith itself.

الأكل والقراءة متعتان رائعتان .. وسوياً يصبحا أكثر إمتاعاً

The more imagination the reader has, being an untrained reader, the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.

Even if it is a vice to read science fiction, those who cannot understand the very temptation to that vice will not be likely to tell us anything of value about it.

He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.

It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.

The literary man re-reads, other men simply read.

He may really have been enjoying an embryonic composition of his own stimulated by mere hints in the book.

In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault.

Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.

[B]ut in Narnia your good clothes were never your uncomfortable ones. They knew how to make things that felt beautiful as well as looking beautiful in Narnia; and there was no such thing as starch or flannel or elastic to be found from one end of the country to the other.

A dream, strayed into daylight.

We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love.

She was beautifully, delicately made,
So small, so unafraid,
Till the bomb came.
Bombs are the same,
Beautifully, delicately made.

I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

I daren't come and drink," said Jill.
Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion.
Oh dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer."I suppose I must go and look for another stream then."
There is no other stream," said the Lion.

The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ

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".

If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder.

You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you.

Enemy-occupied territory-that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.

Sometimes it is hard not to say, 'God forgive God.' Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.

Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed.

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

of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house.

Don't think of God in terms of forms, because forms are limited and God is unlimited.

The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking "But I never knew before. I never dreamed...." I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, "It reminds me of straw.

I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.

The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty.

Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self.

You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues.

It must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery.

No llegaremos nunca a conseguir una sociedad cristiana hasta que la mayoría de nosotros lo desee de verdad. Y no lo desearemos de verdad hasta que nos hagamos totalmente cristianos.

Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.

You are saying what is true, but you are not getting any further.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.

[The devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs-pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.

The more I resist [Christ] and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call 'Myself' becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and cannot stop.

The Order of the Divine mind, embodied in the Divine Law, is beautiful. What should a man do but try to reproduce it, so far as possible, in his daily life?

When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realises that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going - provided he does it for honesty's sake and not just to annoy his parents - the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him than it ever was before.

I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hands.

Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature’s apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on.

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

I believe in Christ like I believe in the sun - not because I can see it, but by it I can see everything else.

A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed.

We don't have a soul. We are a soul. We happen to have a body.

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it isn't. We can't compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We're dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about!

And that is just precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not 'a religion', nor 'a philosophy.' It is the summing up and actuality of them all.

Safe?' said Mr. Beaver. 'Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe, but he's good. He's the King, I tell you.

That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.

Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.

Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.

While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend.

The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.

this is a book about something

We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.

The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil’s whole structure away.

The (children's) book is a specimen of the most scandalous escapism: it paints a happiness under incompatible conditions – the sort of freedom we can have only in childhood and the sort we can have only in maturity – and conceals the contradiction by the further pretense that the characters are not human beings at all.

A man who admits that dwarfs and giants and talking beasts and witches are still dear to him in his 50-third year is now less likely to be praised for his perennial youth than scorned and pitied for arrested development.

I felt sure that [Oyarsa] was what we call "good," but I wasn't sure whether I liked "goodness" so much as I had supposed.

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.

The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.

And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.
-An Experiment in Criticism

That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.

When you painted on earth – at least in your earlier days – it was because you caught glimpses of heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too.

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I
In a Berkshire bar. The big workman
Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe
All the evening, from his empty mug
With gleaming eye glanced towards us:
"I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely.

If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.

I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.

Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator - to enact intellectually, volitionally and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature when it does so, it is good and happy.

Feelings come and go, and when they come a good use can be made of them, but they cannot be our regular spiritual diet.

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

I am not a scholar of the past, but I am a lover of the past.

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient book should be read only by the professionals, and the amateur should content himself with modern books.

The present state of the world is normal; it with the last (19th) century that with the abnormality.

The most important events in every age never reach the history books.

Where they (modern books) are true they will give us truths we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep it clean seabreeze of the centuries flowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the 20th century– the blindness about which posterity will ask,'but how COULD they have thought that?' lies where we have never suspected it.

When two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also - I must put it crudely - good people; controlled, loyal, fair-minded, mutually adaptable people.

Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which grow up ten years later into domestic hatred.

I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids.

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.

We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Gran parte de una desgracia cualquiera consiste, por así decirlo, en la sombra de la desgracia, en la reflexión sobre ella. Es decir en el hecho de que no se limite uno a sufrir, sino que se vea obligado a seguir considerando el hecho de que sufre.

Pain provides an opportunity for heroism; the opportunity is seized with surprising frequency.

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.

But I want her, I must have her, I shall die if I do not get her - false, proud, black-hearted daughter of a dog that she is! I cannot sleep and my food has no savor and my eyes are darkened because of her beauty. I must have the barbarian queen.

No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.

Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure.

Man is to be understood only in his relation to God.

The real pacificus is he who promotes peace, not he who gasses about it.

The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.

The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose, and that is to support the ultimate career.

The alternative to rule is not freedom but the unconstitutional (and often unconscious) tyranny of the most selfish member.

If Christian teachers wish to recall Christian people to domesticity the first necessity is to stop telling lies about home life and to substitute realistic teaching.

He values home as the place where he can "be himself" in the sense of trampling on all the restraints which civilized humanity has found to be indispensable for tolerable social intercourse.

It would never occur to them to say at home (as pastors' kids) anything they were really thinking, unless it is forced out of them by anger.

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

Take from a man his freedom or his goods and you may have taken his innocence, almost his humanity, as well.

This shame has nothing to do with He or She. It's the being mortal - how shall I say it? ... insufficient.

It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.

Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.

...You won't get eternal life by just feeling the presence of God in flowers or music.

The world of 'broad-mindedness' and watered-down 'religion' is a world where a small number of people (all the same type) say totally different things and change their minds every few minutes.

But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.

Writing for children "compels you to throw all the force of the book into what was done and said. It checks what a kind, but discerning critic called 'the expository demon' in me.

Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with the vast continent we really belong to.

Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . ."

The mark of Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all.

People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.

Once when I had remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, "Yes. But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs.

The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!

At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends - comrades - do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed...

Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.

Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

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

Friendship is the happiest and most fully human of all loves, the crown of life.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.

That we, though small, might quiver with Fire’s same
Substantial form as Thou-not reflect merely
Like lunar angels back to Thee cold flame.
Gods are we, Thou hast said; and we pay dearly.

Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.

For the entrance is low: we must stoop till we are no taller than children to get in.

The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? […] Where I formerly had one pleasure, I now have two.

I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of the State? You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.

Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.

You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.

In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.

And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.

All joy... emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.

This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!

The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.

I believe it all. If I seem not to, it is only that my joy is too great to let my belief settle itself.

And there lies the deadly error. Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else-whether a distance mountain, or the past, or the golds of Asgard-does the "thrill" arise. It is a by-product. Its very existence presupposes that you desire not it but something other and outer.

If we cannot persuade our friends by reasons we must be content "and not bring a mercenary army to our aid" (He meant passions.)

As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist - making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible.

I gather they are even vaguely pacifist, not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of purely fashionable and literary communism.

A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others...thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.

The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.

By the way, don't 'weep inwardly' and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we - and especially, my sex - don't cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and Hector and Beowulf, Roland and Lancelot blubbered like schoolgirls, so why shouldn't we?

The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time-for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future.

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary

He builds whole world of imagery and passion, any one of which would have served another writer for a whole book, only to pull each of them to pieces and pour scorn on it.

Lewis encourages his cancer-stricken and temporarily depressed wife that uncertainty rather than hopelessness is our cross.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion.

A man can’t be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it.

In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.

You know, my dear, it's only doing you harm to write vers libre. After you have been writing strict, rhyming verse for about 10 years it will be time to venture on the free sort. At present it only encourages you to write prose not so good as your ordinary prose and type it like verse.

What "inspires" my books? Really I don't know. Does anyone know where exactly an idea comes from? With me all fiction begins with pictures in my head. But where the pictures come from I couldn't say.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” C.S. Lewis

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