Top 2077 Quotes & Sayings by C. S. Lewis - Page 4

A dragon has just flown over the tree-tops and lighted on the beach. Yes, I am afraid it is between us and the ship. And arrows are no use against dragons. And they're not at all afraid of fire." "With your Majesty's leave-" began Reepicheep. "No, Reepicheep," said the King very firmly, "you are not to attempt a single combat with it.

We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms.

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

The holier a man becomes, the more he mourns over the unholiness which remains in him.

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?

Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.

Our Heavenly Father has provided many delightful inns for us along our journey, but he takes great care to see that we do not mistake any of them for home.

We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.

The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.

True friends don’t spend time gazing into each other’s eyes. They may show great tenderness towards each other but they face in the same direction - toward common projects, goals - above all, towards a common Lord.

The more pride we have, the more other people’s pride irritates us

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

The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint ... but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'

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

Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.

A clever arrangement of bad eggs will never make a good omelet.

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

It is not your business to succeed, but to do right. When you have done so the rest lies with god.

In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.

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

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher. He'd be either a lunatic on a level with a man who says he's a poached egg or else he'd be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair.

But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.

A man whose life has been transformed by Christ cannot help but have his worldview show through.

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.

The death of a beloved is an amputation.

I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless he sees that it is good for him to wait.

Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want

In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death.

When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.

A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.

We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.

Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord. J.I. Packer Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.

Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.

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.

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

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

Christ, who said to the disciples, 'You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.'

If our deepest desires cannot be satisfied in this world, then we must have been made for another world.

The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.

Prayer does not change God; it changes me.

The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.

Seek Unity and you will find neither Unity nor Truth.Seek the light of truth, and you will find Unity and Truth.

No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'.

Jesus produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.

Love is unselfishly choosing for another's highest good.

A Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

If we only have the will to walk, then God is pleased with our stumbles.

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

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

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

We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

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?

Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to 'cure' it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers.

And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.

Man does not have a soul. He is a soul. He has a body.

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.