Famous Cs Lewis Quotations

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"There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them."
by C.S. Lewis
"A little lie is like a little pregnancy it doesn't take long before everyone knows."
by C.S. Lewis
"A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you can't see something that's above you"
by C.S. Lewis
"Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth thrown in. Aim at Earth and you get neither"
by C.S. Lewis
"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.."
by C.S. Lewis
"Dualism is a truncated metaphysic"
by C.S. Lewis
"Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it"
by C.S. Lewis
"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"
by C.S. Lewis
"Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire"
by C.S. Lewis
"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"
by C.S. Lewis
"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"
by C.S. Lewis
"If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself"
by C.S. Lewis
"If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business"
by C.S. Lewis
"If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally"
by C.S. Lewis
"If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there? by"
by C.S. Lewis
"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next."
by C.S. Lewis
"It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous"
by C.S. Lewis
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained"
by C.S. Lewis
"Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal"
by C.S. Lewis
"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"
by C.S. Lewis
"Moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine."
by C.S. Lewis
"Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours"
by C.S. Lewis
"Other than heaven, the only place where one's heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell"
by C.S. Lewis
"Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased"
by C.S. Lewis
"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man"
by C.S. Lewis
"Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all"
by C.S. Lewis
"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"
by C.S. Lewis
"The absent are easily refuted"
by C.S. Lewis
"The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don't"
by C.S. Lewis
"The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not"
by C.S. Lewis
"The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world"
by C.S. Lewis
"There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth"
by C.S. Lewis
"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"
by C.S. Lewis
"Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one"
by C.S. Lewis
"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."
by C.S. Lewis
"We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin"
by C.S. Lewis
"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful"
by C.S. Lewis
"What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are."
by C.S. Lewis The Magician's Nephew
"When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right"
by C.S. Lewis
"When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all"
by C.S. Lewis
"Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later"
by C.S. Lewis
"Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position"
by C.S. Lewis
"Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease? by"
by C.S. Lewis
"Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism"
by C.S. Lewis
"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream"
by C.S. Lewis
"You don't have a Soul. You are a Soul. You have a body"
by 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"
by C.S. Lewis
"You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the univerise in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built"
by C.S. Lewis
"You play the hand you're dealt. I think the game's worthwhile"
by C.S. Lewis
"You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house"
by C.S. Lewis
"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."
by C.S. Lewis
"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."
by C.S. Lewis
"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."
by C.S. Lewis
"Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light."
by C.S. Lewis
"Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they own their bodies -- those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!"
by C.S. Lewis
"A faith in culture is as bad as a faith in religion; both expressions imply a turning away from those very things which culture and religion are about. Culture as a collective name for certain very valuable activities is a permissible word; but culture hypostatized, set up on its own, made into a faith, a cause, a banner, a platform, is unendurable. For none of the activities in question cares a straw for that faith or cause. It is like a return to early Semitic religion where names themselves were regarded as powers."
by C.S. Lewis
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
by C.S. Lewis
"All joy emphasises our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings."
by C.S. Lewis
"We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn."
by C.S. Lewis
"The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world."
by C.S. Lewis
"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adults themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.... When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
by C.S. Lewis
"Faith... is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods."
by C.S. Lewis
"You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better -- the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read."
by C.S. Lewis
"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."
by C.S. Lewis
"If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love."
by C.S. Lewis
"Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth, and you will get neither."
by C.S. Lewis
"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."
by C.S. Lewis
"Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind."
by C.S. Lewis
"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...."
by C.S. Lewis
"In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them. There is here a cruel dilemma before us. If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing directly into the Enemy's hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behaviour, this sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor.This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy's motives for creating a dangerous world-a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that 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. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yieldsto danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky."
by C.S. Lewis
"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."
by 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."
by C.S. Lewis
"The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not."
by C.S. Lewis
"They tell me, Lord, that when I seem To be in speech with you. Since but one voice is heard, it"
by C.S. Lewis
"There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind."
by C.S. Lewis
"A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you can't see something that's above you."
by C.S. Lewis
"Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal."
by C.S. Lewis
"If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?"
by CS Lewis
"If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?"
by C.S. Lewis
"Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one..."
by C.S. Lewis
"There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ' Thy will be done ' and those to whom God says, ' All right, then, have it your way '."
by C.S. Lewis
"All that is not eternal is eternally out of date."
by C.S. Lewis
"But perhaps the most mysterious thing he ever said about it was this. I was questioning him on the subject"
by C.S. Lewis
"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 wh..."
by C.S. Lewis


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