But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Age
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Feelings
As for wrinkles—Pshaw! Why shouldn’t we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Age
The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Truth
Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.
—C. S. Lewis
You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Philosophy
If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a “wandering to find home,” why should we not look forward to the arrival?
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Nature, Dying, Death
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Giving, Charity
The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Evangelism
When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.
—C. S. Lewis
True friends … face in the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Goal, Friendship
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Survival, Friendship, Friends
Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Earth
You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: One liners, Body
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Creativity, To Be Born Everyday, Truth
But perhaps the most mysterious thing he ever said about it was this. I was questioning him on the subject
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Words
It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: The Bible
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Heaven
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.”
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Writing
I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in.
—C. S. Lewis
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
—C. S. Lewis
I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Evil
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Joy, Excitement, Pleasure
Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Prayer
And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
—C. S. Lewis
We meet no ordinary people in our lives.
—C. S. Lewis
When we lose one blessing, another is often, most unexpectedly, given in its place.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Blessings
The decay of logic results from an untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.
—C. S. Lewis
We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities, and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But 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.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Pain, God, Pleasure, Conscience
The safest road to hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Hell
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Rudyard Kipling British Children’s Books Writer
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan Irish-born British Playwright
- J. K. Rowling English Novelist
- Mary Wollstonecraft English Writer, Feminist
- Ouida (Maria Louise Rame) English Novelist
- Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
- A. A. Milne British Humorist, Children’s Writer
- Ursula K. Le Guin Science-fiction writer
- Enoch Powell British Politician
- Carl Sandburg American Poet, Historian
Leave a Reply