CS Lewis Quotes that Will Fill You with Inspiration and Courage
– CS Lewis Quotes –
The purpose of this CS Lewis quote is to help you preserve your optimism and the courage to believe that things will get better over time, even when the odds are stacked against you. If you relapse into an unhealthy lifestyle, don’t give up.
About CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis was a British writer and lay theologian who lived from November 29, 1898, until November 22, 1963. He was a professor of English literature at both Oxford (Magdalen College, 1925–1954) and Cambridge (Magdalene College, 1954–1963) universities.
He is most known for his fictional writings, including The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, as well as his nonfiction Christian apologetics, including Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.
Lewis married Joy Davidman, an American writer, in 1956, she died of cancer four years later at 45. Lewis died of renal failure on November 22, 1963, one week before his 65th birthday.
Lewis was honoured with a monument in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death.
Life-changing CS Lewis Quotes
1. ”You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God.”
2. ”Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself”
3. ”You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
4. ”Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
5. ”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.”
6. ”A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
7. ”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.”
8. ”The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
9. ”Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather, it is one of those things which gives value to survival.” CS Lewis Quotes
10. ”Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
Self-fulfilment Quotes
11. ”I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
12. ”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.”
13. ”To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”CS Lewis Quotes
14. ”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.”
15. ”There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
16. ”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.”
17. ”Love is not an affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
18. 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.
19. ”Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
20. ”I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
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Self-discipline Quotes
21. ”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..’
22. ”God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.”
23. ”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.”
24. ”I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”
25. ”You can make anything by writing.” –CS Lewis
26. ”No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
27. ”He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man-made, He would have done no less.”
28. ”The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only and that is to support the ultimate career.”
29. ”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.”
30. ”What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”
32. ”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.”
33. ”Courage, dear heart”
34. ”The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
35. ”Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”
36. ”What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
37. ”Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil.”
38. ”God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.”
39. ”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?”
40. ”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.”
Condescending Behavioural Quotes
41. ”A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”
42. ”Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
43. ”We meet no ordinary people in our lives.”
44. ”She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.”
45. ”There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
46. ”Things never happen the same way twice.”
47. ”That’s the worst of girls,” said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. “They never can carry a map in their heads.”
“That’s because our heads have something inside them,” said Lucy.”
48. ”The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not.” CS Lewis Quotes
49. ”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 a man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
50. ”I think that if God forgives us, we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.”
51. ”Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”
52. ”It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.”
53. ”Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”
54. ”Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.”
55. ”Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”
56. ”Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.”
57. ”We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”
58. ”We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
59. ”It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality, our best work is done by keeping things out.”
Aspirational Quotes
60. ”Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.”
61. ”Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, the only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
62. ”When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.”
63. ”If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.”
64. ”Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,…Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.”
65. ”Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.”
66. ”The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.”
67. ”The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” CS Lewis Quotes
68. ”You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” said the Lion.”
69. ”It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.”
70. ”If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
71. ”You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
72. ”I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night, but if you have been – if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes, in the end, a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.”
73. ”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.”
74. ”One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.’
75. ”I was with a book, as a woman is with child”.
76. ”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.”
77. ”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.”
78. ”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.”
79. ”When you argue against Him, you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.”
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Courageous Quotes to Uplift Your Spirit
80. ”You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.”
81. ”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.”
82. ”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.”
83. ”But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan”.
84. ”Do not dare not to dare”.
85. ‘The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.”
86. ”But no one except Lucy knew that as it circled the mast it had whispered to her, “Courage, dear heart,” and the voice, she felt sure, was Aslan’s, and with the voice, a delicious smell breathed in her face.”
87. ”No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”
88. ”Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.’
89. ”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.”
90. ”There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”
91. ”Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.”
92. ”Spiteful words can hurt your feelings, but silence breaks your heart.”
93. ”He’ll be coming and going,” he had said. “One day you’ll see him and another you won’t. He doesn’t like being tied down—and of course, he has other countries to attend to. It’s quite all right. He’ll often drop in. Only you mustn’t press him. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.”
94. ”Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
95. ”The death of a beloved is an amputation.”
96. ”You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.”
97. ”Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”
98. ”Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh,” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…” 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.”
99. ”Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God, do you learn.”
100. ”Child,’ said the Lion, ‘I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.”
101. ”A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
102. ”It was when I was happiest that I longed most…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
103. ”Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
104. ”The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
105. ”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.”
106. ”I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.”
107. ”It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg.
We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
108. ”Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.”
109. ”Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.”
110. ”I am [in your world].’ said Aslan. ‘But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”
111. ”Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good.”
112. ”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.”
113. ”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.”
114. ”Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; 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.”
115. ”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.”
CS Lewis Focus Quotes that Lights Up Positivity
116. ”Nothing is yet in its true form.”
117. ”He’s not safe, but he’s good.”
118. ”For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
119. ”There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.”
120. ”Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.”
121. ”Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I’m afraid to even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.”
122. ”Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.”
123. ”You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream.”
124. ”All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.”
125. ”A woman’s heart should be so close to God that a man should have to chase Him to find her”.
126.” 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 gives value to survival.”
127. ”To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself.”
128. ”If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes, in the end, a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.”
129.”Suspicion often creates what it suspects.”
130. ”We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
Knowledgeable Quotes for the Wise
131. ”Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.”
132. ”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 anymore, you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.”
133. ”It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.”
134. ”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.”
135. ”The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.”
136. ”When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown-up.”
137. ”No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.”
138. ”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.”
139. ”When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour 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.”
140. ”If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.” CS Lewis Quotes
141. ”Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book which will break your heart.”
142. ”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.”
143. ”I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.”
144. ”God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.”
145. ”Always winter, but never Christmas.”
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146. ”I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”
147. ”Aslan: You doubt your value. Don’t run from who you are.”
148. ”My own eyes are not enough for me; I will see through those of others.”
149.”It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.”
CS Lewis Self improvement Quotes About Life
150. ”You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God.”
151. ”Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.”
152.”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.”
153. ”Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.”
154. ”Knock and it shall be opened.’ But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?”
155. ”Readers are advised to remember the devil is a liar.”
156.”Girls aren’t very good at keeping maps in their brains, “, said Edmund, “That’s because we’ve got something in them”, replied Lucy.”
157. ”People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.”
158. ”Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected.”
159. ”For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
160. ”I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it or not. I hate if they do and if they don’t.”
161. ”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.”
162. ”We are what we believe we are!”
163. ”Wouldn’t it be dreadful if someday in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you’d never know which were which.”
164. ”The Future is, of all things, the thing least like an eternity. It is the most temporal part of the time–for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.”
165. ”Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.”
166. ”I seemed to hear God saying, “Put down your gun and we’ll talk.”
167. ”Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
168. ”One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.”
169. ”He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.”
170. ”At the end of things, The Blessed will say, “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.” And the lost will say, We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
171. ”They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”
172. ”Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him.”
173. ”Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.”
174. ”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?”
Worthy Quotes to Boost Yourself
175. ”If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist, you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.”
176. ”My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.”
177. ”Remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.”
178. ”Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”
179. ”Die before you die, there is no chance after.”
180. ”Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.”
181. ”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.”
182. ”Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
183. ”Repentance means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into… It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death.”
184. ”I desired dragons with a profound desire.”
185. ”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.”
186. ”Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality, our best work is done by keeping things out.”
187. ”This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there’s a rumour going around the shop that some of us are someday going to come to life.”
188. ”In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”
189. ”This was bad grammar, of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia–in our world, they usually don’t talk at all.”
190. ”Emerson said, Do you love me? Means do you see the same truth?-Or at least, “Do you care about the same truth?”
191. ”The promise made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.”
192. ”Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!”
CS Lewis Self Adore Quotes
193. ”I was not born to be free-I was born to adore and obey.”
194. ”Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”
195. ”Aren’t all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?”
196. ”Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”
197. ”This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”
198. ”’There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.”
199. ”Are the gods not just? Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”
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200. ”You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.”
201. ”In God, there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”
202. ”In the same way, a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble–because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.”
203. ”Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of extraordinary destiny.”
204. ”The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.”
205. ”Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”
206. ”Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that’s all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.”
207. ”Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together. If the voice within us does not say this it is not the voice of Eros.”
208. ”We read to know we are not alone.”
209. ”Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe. How would it be if you came and had tea with me?”
210. ”Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.”
211. ”If there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
212. ”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. ”
213. ”All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now, at last, they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
214. ”if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one”.
215. ”It is better to forget about yourself altogether.”
216. ”She did not shut it properly because she knew that it is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one.”
217. ”Let’s pray that the human race never escapes Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.”
218. ”A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.”
219. ”And men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins”
Wonderful Discoveries Quotes
220. ”Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect.” CS Lewis Quotes
221. ”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.”
222. ”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.”
223. ”Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.”
224. ”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.”
225. ”Aslan’s instructions always work; there are no exceptions.”
226. ”If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.”
227. ”You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To “see-through” all things is the same as not to see.”
228. ”Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.”
229. ”Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time.” “Are they?” said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.”
230. ”Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that.”
231. ”No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.”
232. ”If ever they remembered their life in this world, it was as one remembers a dream.”
233. ”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.”
234. ”The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help maybe just that time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.”
235. ”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.”
236. ”The stamp of the Saint is that he can waive his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus.”
237. ”Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.”
238. ”We need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.”
239. ”Don’t you mind,” said Puddle glum. “There are no accidents. Our guide is Aslan, and he was there when the giant king caused the letters to be cut, and he knew already all things that would come of them; including this.”
240. ”This is the land of Narnia,’ said the Faun, ‘where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea.” CS Lewis Quotes
241. ”What seems our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feelings. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.”
242. ”Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it.”
243. ”No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.”
244. ”Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.” CS Lewis Quotes
245. ”Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”
246. ”The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.”
247.” And so for a time, it looked as if all the adventures were coming to an end; but that was not to be.”
248. ”Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is especially true of humility.” CS Lewis Quotes
249. ”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.”
Virtuous Quotes for Spiritual Life
250. ”It is not your business to succeed but to do right. When you have done so the rest lies with god.”
251. ”I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.”
252. ”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.”
253. ”We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.”
254. ”Alas,” said Aslan, shaking his head. “It will. Things always work according to their nature. She has won her heart’s desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess.
But the length of days with an evil heart is only the length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.” CS Lewis Quotes
255. ”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.”
256. ”When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.”
257. ”Wouldn’t he know without being asked?’ said Polly. ‘I’ve no doubt he would,’ said the Horse (still with his mouth full). ‘But I have a sort of an idea he likes to be asked.”
258. ”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?”
259. ”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.”
260. ”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 Goodlight’ in the woods of our experience.”
261. ”This is a book about something.”
262. ”There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.”
263. ”It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realise for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.”
264. ”Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”CS Lewis Quotes
265. ”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.”
266. ”For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.” CS Lewis Quotes
267. ”I have been wandering to find him and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that he called me Beloved, me who am but as a dog.”
268. ”And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.”
269. ”All get what they want; they do not always like it.”
270. ”Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.”
Misery Quotes that Drains Your Happiness
271. ”Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like.”
272. ”Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”
273. ”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..”
274. ”Be not deceived, Wormwood, our cause is never more in jeopardy than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe in which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
275. ”Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.”
278. ”Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.”
279. ”Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours.”
280. ”Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”
281. ”One always feels better when one has made up one’s mind.”
282. ”We know nothing of religion here: we only think of Christ.”
283. ”For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”
284. ”We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely”
285. ”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.” CS Lewis Quotes
286. ”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.”
287. ”If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”
288. ”We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.”
289. ”Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.”
290. ”We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.”
291. ”This moment contains all moments.”
292. ”Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.”
293.” No people find each other more absurd than lovers.” CS Lewis Quotes
294. ”Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”
295. ”Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.”
296. ”It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.” CS Lewis Quotes
297. ”And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back—if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?”
298. ”That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.” CS Lewis Quotes
299. ”No man who says, ‘I’m as good as you,’ believes it. He would not say it if he did.”
Intellectual Quotes that Reboots the Mind
300. ”When pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.”
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301. ”What do they teach them at these schools?”
302. ‘It is very true. But even a traitor may mend. I have known one who did.”
303. Narnia! It’s all in the wardrobe, just like I told you!”
304. ”No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
305. ”Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”
306. ”The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.”
307. ”Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to manoeuvre you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.”
308. ”Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to the 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”
309. ”That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”
310. ”When you go to church you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.”
311. ”Now, at last, they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” CS Lewis Quotes
312. ”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.”
313. ”What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects–with their Christianity latent.”
314. ”Joy is the serious business of heaven.”
315. ”Ah, you’ve come over the water. Powerful wet stuff, ain’t it?”
316.” 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.”
317. ”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.”
318. ”I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.”
319. ”How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?”
320. ”Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you’ve been disappointed so often before.”
Devotional Quotes by C. S. Lewis
321. ”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.”
322. ”Now sir, said the bulldog in his business-like way. ‘Are you a animal, vegetable, or mineral?’
– The Magician’s Nephew”
323. ”Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear’
324. ”To please God… to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness… to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.”
325. ”Please,’ she said, ‘You’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I’d rather be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.”
326. ”While friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness,acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.”
327. ”When I’m older I’ll understand” said Lucy, ” I am older and I don’t think I want to understand”, replied Edmund” CS Lewis Quotes
328. ”A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.”
329. ”’A great many of those who “debunk” traditional or (as they would say) “sentimental” values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.” CS Lewis Quotes
330. ”What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.”’
331. ”I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with them.”
332. ”People shouldn’t call for demons unless they really mean what they say.”
333. ”A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.”
334. ”A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.” CS Lewis Quotes
335. ”An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy.
If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao, there is no grounds for criticising either the Tao or anything else.”
336. ”The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one!”
337. ”But who can feel ugly when their heart feels joy.”
338. ”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.”
339. ”If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.”
340. ”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 well say that birth doesn’t matter.”
341. ”In those days Mr Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastable were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.”
342. ”All your life, an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”
343. ”Feeling like the voice she liked best in all the world was calling her name.”
344.” Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone. ”
345. ”When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less.”
346. ”Look for the valleys, the green places, and fly through them. There will always be a way through.”
347.” No thanks,” said Digory, “I don’t know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I’d rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven.”
348. ”I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.”
349. ”The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred” CS Lewis Quotes
350. ”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 hand.”
UnKnowledgeable Quotes that May Inspire You
351. ”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?”
352. ”If you thirst you may drink.”
353. ”Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merelynotional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.”
354. ”Life isn’t all fricasseed frogs and eel pie.”
355. ”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.” CS Lewis Quotes
356. ”Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”
357. ”Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you’re making.”
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358. ”We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.”
359. ”It was a full moon and, shining on all the snow, it made everything almost as bright as day — only the shadows were rather confusing.”
360. ”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.”
361. ”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.”
362. ”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.”
363. ”See the bear in his own den before you judge of his conditions.”
364. ”The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths–but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.
365. “They call him Aslan in That Place,” said Eustace. “What a curious name!”. “Not half so curious as himself,” said Eustace solemnly.”
366. ”That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God.”
367. ”As 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.”
368. ”Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.”
369. ”Further up and further in” CS Lewis Quotes
370. ”But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growling and roarings. Oh, Adam’s son, how cleverly you defend yourself against all that might do you good.”
Realistic Quotes to Spice Up Your Mind
371. ”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.”
372. ”You don’t think – not possibly – not as a mere hundredth chance – there might be things that are real though we can’t see them?… If there are souls, could there not be soul-houses?”
373. ”Though under the earth, and throneless, now I will be. Yet while I lived, all earth was under me.”
374. ”He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand.”
375. ”The decay of Logic results from an untroubled assumption that the particular is real, and the universal is not.”
376. ”You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.”
377. ”There might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death.”
378. ”Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.”
379.” But as long as you know you’re nobody special, you’ll be a very decent sort of horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another.” CS Lewis Quotes
380.” Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved.”
381. ”Shall I ever be able to read that story again; the one I couldn’t remember? Will you tell it to me, Aslan? Oh do, do, do.”Indeed, yes, I will tell it to you for tea.”
382. ”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.”
383.”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 myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
384. ”Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?”
385. ”All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be”
Fidelity Quotes
386. ”In your world, I have another name. You should know me by it.”
387. ”The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
388. ”He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.” CS Lewis Quotes
389. ”I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”
390. ”Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan.”
391. ”It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.”
391. ”In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.”
392. ”Tea should be taken in solitude.”
393. ”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 vanished away.”
394. ”the ugliest things in human nature are perversions of good and innocent things.”
395. ”Almost certainly, God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments, one following another…Ten-thirty– and every other moment from the beginning of the world—is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.”
396. ”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.”
397. ”If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable.”
398. ”Once very near the end, I said, ‘If you can — if it is allowed — come to me when I too am on my deathbed.’ ‘Allowed!’ she said. ‘Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.”
399. ”If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it’s not so bad.”
Supernatural CS Lewis Quotes
400. ”Am I to understand,’ said Reepicheep to Lucy after a long stare at Eustace, ‘That this singularly discourteous person is under your Majesty’s protection? Because, if not.”
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401. ”We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. They become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us and also destroy themselves.
For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.”
402. ”The humans live in time, but our enemy (God) destines them for eternity.”
403. ”What can you ever really know of other people’s souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole of creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him.”
404. ”I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion mathematics lies in wait for you.” CS Lewis Quotes
405. ”No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock, it is opened.”
406. ”Who are you?’ One who has waited long for you to speak.”
407. ”Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.”
408. ”I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.”
409. ”In our adversity, God shouts to us.”
410. ”In Science, we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity, we find the poem itself.”
411. ”Things always work according to their nature.” CS Lewis Quotes
412. ”We want not so much a Father but a grandfather in heaven, a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?”
413. ”He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand, and if only the will to walk is really there. He is pleased even with their stumbles.”
414. ”The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”
415. ”Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, forever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.”
416. ”In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself…I see with a myriad of eyes,but it is still I who see.”
417. ”When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen
different doors and to those who are still in the hall.” CS Lewis Quotes
418. ”She remembered, as every sensible person does, that you should never shut yourself up in a wardrobe.”
419. ”faith is the art of holding on to things in spite of your changing moods and circumstances.”
420. ”Every disability conceals a vocation if only we can find it, which will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.”
421. ”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.”
422. ”That world is ended as if it had never been. Let the race of Adam and Eve take warning.”
423. ”Nothing is wonderful except in the abnormal, and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm.”
424. ”for the greater the love, the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith, the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress.”
425. ”You have no idea what an appetite it gives one, being executed.”
426. ”Nor am I greatly moved by jocular inquiries such as, ‘Where will you put all the mosquitoes?’ — a question to be answered on its own level by pointing out that, if the worst came to worst, a heaven for mosquitoes and a hell for men could very conveniently be combined.” CS Lewis Quotes
427. ”Even I never dreamed of Magic like this!”
428. ”What we work out in our journals we don’t take out on family and friends.”
429. ”Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.”
Rectitudes Quotes for Man Life
430. ”Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears.”
431. ”All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary”
432. ”And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual-I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.”
433. ”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.”
434. ”The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat everyone kindly, finds him liking more and more people as he goes on – including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.”
435. ”The witch would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”
436. ”The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”
437. ”But when your sword breaks, you draw your dagger.”
438. ”For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”
439. ”If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account was not faith but imagination.”
440. ”The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.”
441. ”Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
442. ”The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him…”
443. ”Being nice doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you feel good because you know you are gracious enough to forgive and smart enough to realise how distasteful some people can be.” CS Lewis Quotes
444. ”Of Course, God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is)… Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.”
445. ”We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.”
446. ”One of the drawbacks about adventures is that when you come to the most beautiful places, you are often too anxious and hurried to appreciate them.”
447. ”People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time.”
448. ”It is much easier to pray for a bore than to go visit him.”
449. ”There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.”
450. ”Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared.”
451. ”The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore warmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.”
452. ”All names will soon be restored to their proper owners.”
453. ”All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: “O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!” Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly: “Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.”
454. ”How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask-half our great theological and metaphysical problems are like that.”
455. ”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?”
456. ”Certainly, Lu. Whatever you like,’ said Peter unexpectedly. This was encouraging, but as Peter instantly rolled round and went to sleep again it wasn’t much use.”
457. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.
458. ”Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”
459. ”Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First, they will not, in the end, they cannot open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food or their eyes to see.”
Tranquillity Quotes to Inspire Your Day
460. ”If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.”
461. ”For jokes as well as justice come in with speech.”
462. ”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.”
463. ”How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.”
464. ”Humour is…the all-consoling and…the all-excusing, grace of life.”
465. ”When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.”
466. ”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.”
467. ”Though our feelings come and go, God’s love for us does not.” CS Lewis Quotes
468. ”Don’t shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see Him.”
469. ”Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.”
470. ”Each time you fall He’ll pick you up. He knows your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection”
471. ”There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.”
472. ”I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.”
473. ”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.”
474. ”God has infinite attention, infinite leisure to spare for each one of us. He doesn’t have to take us in the line. You’re as much alone with Him as if you were the only thing He’d ever created.”
475. ”I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.”
476. ”and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.”
477. ”And there we all were, as invisible as you could wish to see.” CS Lewis Quotes
478. ”Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another are not.”
479. ”Bent creatures are full of fears.”
480. ”Puddle glum’s my name. But it doesn’t matter if you forget it. I can always tell you again.”
481. ”’The bolt of Tash falls from above!’ ‘Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway?”
482. ”Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.” CS Lewis Quotes
483. ”But the length of days with an evil heart is only a length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.”
484. ”You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.”
485. ”Come, live with me and you’ll know me.”
486. ”I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms, said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.”
487. ”You see, Aslan didn’t tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he’s up, I shouldn’t wonder. But that doesn’t let us off following the signs.”
488. ”Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. (And) There is no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and wrong are..”
489. ”My idea of God is a not divine idea. It has to be shattered from time to time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?..”
490. ”It takes courage to live through suffering, and it takes honesty to observe it.”
491. ”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.” CS Lewis Quotes
491. ”For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.”
492. ”100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.”
491. ”The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose, and that is to support the ultimate career.”
492. ”When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over.”
493. ”The harder you tried not to think, the more you thought.”
494. ”People who know a lot of the same things can hardly help talking about them.”
495. ”The dream is ended- this is the morning.”
496. ”Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.”
497. ”’I’d rather be killed fighting for Narnia than grow old and stupid at home and perhaps go about in a bath-chair and then die in the end just the same.”
498. ”You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.”
499. ”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.”
Wisdom Quotes
500. ”A noble friend is the best gift. A noble enemy is the next best.” CS Lewis Quotes
501. ”I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters, what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that?”
502. ”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 being happy on any other terms.”
503. ”Odd, the way the less the Bible is read, the more it is translated.”
504. ”Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
505. ”The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that’s new to him.”
506. ”Don’t bother too much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered.
In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behaviour.” CS Lewis Quotes
507. ”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.”
508. ”A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.”
509. ”Well done, last of the Kings of Narnia, who stood firm at the darkest hour.’ ‘CS Lewis Quotes
510. ”The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.”
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511. ”But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn’t yet, or used to be Human once and isn’t now, or ought to be Human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”
512. ”Child, that is why all the rest are now a horror to her. That is what happens to those who pluck and eat fruits at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Oh, the fruit is good, but they loath it ever after.”
513. ”You weren’t a decent man, and you didn’t do your best. We none of us were and none of us did.”
514. ”But who is Aslan? Do you know him? Well-he knows me,” said Edmund. He is the great Lion, the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, who saved me and saved Narnia.”
515. ”I have said that she had no face, but that meant she had a thousand faces.”
516. ”Am I lost or just less found?” CS Lewis Quotes
517. ”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.”
518. ”They would say he answered, that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
519.”Fancy sleeping on air. I wonder if anyone’s done it before. I don’t suppose they have. Oh, bother—-Scrubb probably has!”
520. ”You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately. Anyway, you can’t get the best out of it.”
Deep Emotional Quotes
521. ”It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain.”
522. ”Falling in love is something that happens to us, being in love is something we do. No passion is self preservatory.”
523. ”And I was the Lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.”
524. ”It may well be that by the trickery of priests, men have sometimes taken a mortal’s voice for a god’s. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god’s voice takes it for a man’s.”
525.”Love is the great conqueror of lust.”
526. ”Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.”
527. ”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.”
528. ”If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.”
529. ”I’m a beast, I am, and a Badger, what’s more. We don’t change. We hold on.”
530. ”In Gethsemane, the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.”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.”
531. ”By gum,’ said Diggory, ‘Don’t I just wish I was big enough to punch your head!”
532. ”Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”
534. ”I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”
534. ”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.”
535. ”Let us go on and take the adventures that shall fall to us.”
536. ”Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.”
537. ”Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.”
538. ”Here, at last, is the thing I was made for.”
539. ”The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.”
540. ”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.”
541. ”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.”
542. ”The best is perhaps what we understand the least.”
543. ”A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.”
544. ”No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”
545. ”A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.” CS Lewis Quotes
546. ”Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.”
547. ”We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We happen to have a body.”
548. ”the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.”
549. ”Oh, I’m a dangerous criminal, I am,’ said the dwarf cheerfully.”
550. ”The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.”
Thank you for taking the time to read this collection of CS Lewis Quotes. Don’t forget to share them with your friends and family on social media.
CSN Team.
