Top 2077 Quotes & Sayings by C. S. Lewis - Page 2

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.

Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.

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

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.

'Good English' is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.

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

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'

Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

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.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

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

There are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid and disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine because that is how God loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but He delights to give.

I'm not sure God wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering.

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.

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.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

You must make your choice: either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

I don't pray so that I can change God. I pray so that God can change me.

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.

There is someone that I love even though I don't approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is......me.

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.

The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.

Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will

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

When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world

You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.

A sign of a culture that has lost its faith - Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.

Don't judge a man by where he is, because you don't know how far he has come.

Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.

If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

God doesn't want something from us. He simply wants us.

The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed.

I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. It doesn't change God - it changes me.

Nothing is really ours until we share it.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.

The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks

Don't shine so that others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see HIM.

In such a fearful world, we need a fearless church

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

If you never take risks, you'll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.

Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.

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

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.

When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.

We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.

Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.