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C. S. Lewis

274 quotes

• “When He died in the Wounded 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. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest eldil, is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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. . . .”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “They [mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?" "Hush," he said sternly. "Do not blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind — ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind — is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Milton was right," said my Teacher. "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “There have been men before . . . who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself . . . as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “'But what of the poor Ghosts who never get into the omnibus at all?' 'Everyone who wishes it does. Never fear. There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.'”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “'God!' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape. 'God what?' asked the Spirit. 'What do you mean, "God what"?' asked the Ghost. 'In our grammar God is a noun' said the Spirit.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “'It comes, it comes!' they sang. 'Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.' One dreadful glance over my shoulder I essayed — not long enough to see (or did I see?) the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes. Screaming, I buried my face in the fold of the Teacher's robe. 'The morning! The morning!' I cried. 'I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.'”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They're all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.' There is consequently a phatic hiatus.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “They have an engine called the Press whereby the people are deceived.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Their own strength has betrayed them. They have . . . pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul—nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Men became scientific because they expected law in Nature; and they expected law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. It does involve the belief that God loves man and for his sake became man and died.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “My form remains one, though the matter in it changes continually. I am, in that respect, like a curve in a waterfall.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the 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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Dedication: "To Lucy Barfield

• “Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) Ch. 15: Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time

• “Who believes in Aslan nowadays?”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Prince Caspian (1951), Ch. 5: Caspian's Adventure in the Mountains

• “To know what would have happened, child? No. Nobody is ever told that.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Prince Caspian (1951), Ch. 10: The Return of the Lion

• “This is where dreams—dreams, do you understand—come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), Ch. 12: The Dark Island

• “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), Ch. 1

• “It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Silver Chair (1953), Ch. 16: The Healing of Harms

• “The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Magician's Nephew (1955), Ch. 10: The First Joke and Other Matters

• “All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia 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 for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Last Battle (1956), Closing lines, in Ch. 16: Farewell to Shadowlands

• “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. 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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. . . . God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger—according to the way you react to it.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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?”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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