C.S. Lewis Quotes

• “Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole outline of Christian history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity.” Now, I veritably believe, I thought-I didn’t of course say; words that would have revealed the nonsense-that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity.” But I hardly remember, for I had not long finished The Everlasting Man when something far more alarming happened to me. Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it really happened once. “… Was there no escape?”
  by C. S. Lewis Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), pp. 223-224
• “If a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. The reasons are obvious. In the first place the parochial organisation should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires. The congregational principle, on the other hand, makes each church into a kind of club, and finally, if all goes well, into a coterie or faction. In the second place, the search for a “suitable” church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil.”
  by C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1942), pp. 72-73.
• “As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it . . . No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will . As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”
  by C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1942), pp. 60-61.
• “…God “demands” praise. He is that Object to admire which (or, if you like, to appreciate which) is simply to be awake, to have entered the real world,; not to appreciate which is to have lost the greatest experience, and in the end to have lost all. The incomplete and crippled lives of those who are tone deaf, have never been in love, never known true friendship, never cared for a good book, never enjoyed the feel of the morning air on their cheeks, never (I am one of these) enjoyed football, are images of it.”
  by C. S. Lewis Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958), p. 92.
• “What is outside the system of self-giving is not earth, nor nature, nor “ordinary life,” but simply and solely hell.”
  by C. S. Lewis The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 152.
• “…it is…a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up “our own” when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is “nothing better” now to be had. The same humility is shown by all those Divine appeals to our fears which trouble high-minded readers of scripture. It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature’s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it “unmindful of His glory’s diminution.” Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask.
  
  If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved? And this illusion of self-sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall.”
  by C. S. Lewis The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 97-98.
• “A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His we are part of the world He came to save…”
  by C. S. Lewis The Problem of Pain, (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 57.
• “The reason for not living on the Fixed Land is now so plain. How could I wish to live there except because it was Fixed? And why should I desire the fixed except to make sure –to be able to command one day where I would be the next and what should happen to me? It was to reject the wave-to draw my hands out of Maledil’s, to say to Him, ‘Not thus, but thus’-to put in our own power what times should roll toward us…as if you gathered fruits together to-day for tomorrow’s eating instead of taking what came. That would have been cold love and feeble trust. And out of it how could we ever have climbed back into love and trust again?””
  by C. S. Lewis Perelandra ( New York: Macmillan, 1943), p. 208.
• “Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings.”
  by C. S. Lewis Perelandra ( New York: Macmillan, 1943), p. 200.
• ““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. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a bit like this…’”
  by C. S. Lewis The Last Battle (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 171.
• ““‘When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been there and always will be there: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.’””
  by C. S. Lewis The Last Battle (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 169-170.
• “But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good! But I will give him the only gift he is still able to receive.”
  
  He bowed his great head rather sadly, and breathed into the Magician’s terrified face. “Sleep,” he said. “Sleep and be separated for some few hours from all the torments you have devised for yourself.” Uncle Andrew immediately rolled over with closed eyes and began breathing peacefully.”
  by C. S. Lewis The Magician’s Nephew (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 185.
• “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things– trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play world, which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side, even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”
  by C. S. Lewis The Silver Chair (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 159.
• ““Supposing I told you I’d been in a place where animals can talk and where there are—er—enchantments and dragons—and, well, all sorts of things you have in fairy tales.” Scrubb felt terribly awkward as he said this and got red in the face.
  “How do you get there?” said Jill. She also felt curiously shy.
  “The only way you can—by Magic,” said Eustace almost in a whisper.”
  by C. S. Lewis The Silver Chair (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 5.
• ““The King who owned this island,” said Caspian slowly, and his face flushed as he spoke, “would soon be the richest of all kings in the world. I claim this land forever as a Narnian possession. It shall be called Goldwater Island. And I bind all you to secrecy. No one must know of this. Not even Drinian-on pain of death, do your hear?”
  
  “Who are you talking to?” said Edmund. “I’m no subject of yours. If anything it’s the other way around. I am one of the four ancient sovereigns of Narnia and you are under allegiance to the High King my brother.”
  
  “So it has come to that, King Edmund, has it?” said Caspian, laying his hand on his sword-hilt…
  
  “Sire,” said Reepicheep, “this is a place with a curse on it. Let us get back on board at once. And if I ever have the honour of naming this island, I should call it Deathwater.””
  by C. S. Lewis The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, (New York: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 105-106.
• ““‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan. “And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.””
  by C. S. Lewis Prince Caspian (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 211-212.
• “Most of our prayers, if fully analysed, ask either for a miracle or an event whose foundations will have to have been laid before I was born, indeed, laid when the universe began. But then to God (though not to me) I and the prayer I make in 1945 were just as much present at the creation of the world as they are now and will be a million years hence. God’s creative act is timeless…”
  by C. S. Lewis Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 178.
• “…I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer ‘No’, he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it.”
  by C. S. Lewis Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 160.
• “The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in Acts. The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the “gospel” or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the “gospels,” the narratives of our Lord’s live and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel.”
  by C. S. Lewis Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 143-144.
• “The doctrine of the Incarnation …digs beneath the surface, works through the rest of our knowledge by unexpected channels, harmonises best with our deepest apprehensions and our “second thoughts”. . . illuminates and orders all other phenomena, explains both our laughter and our logic, our fear of the dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die, and which at one stroke covers what multitudes of separate theories will hardly cover for us if this is rejected.”
  by C. S. Lewis Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 131.
• “In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down . . . down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him.”
  by C. S. Lewis Miracles (New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 111.
• “To be sure, God might be expected to make a better story than my friend. But it is a very long story, with a complicated plot; and we are not, perhaps, very attentive readers.”
  by C. S. Lewis Miracles (New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 99.
• “If the ultimate Fact is not an abstraction but the living God, opaque by the very fulness of His blinding actuality, then He might do things. He might work miracles. But would He? Many people of sincere piety feel that He would not. They think it unworthy of Him. It is petty and capricious tyrants who break their own laws: good and wise kinds obey them. Only an incompetent workman will produce work which needs to be interfered with. And people who believe in this way are not satisfied by the assurances given in Chapter VIII that miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature… This feeling springs from deep and noble sources in the mind and must always be treated with respect. Yet it is, I believe , founded on an error.”
  by C. S. Lewis Miracles (New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 95.
• “God is basic Fact or Actuality, the source of all other facthood. At all costs therefore He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. If He exists at all, He is the most concrete thing there is, the most individual, “organised and minutely articulated.” He is unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language. The words incorporeal and impersonal are misleading, because they suggest that He lacks some reality which we posses. It would be safer to call His trans-corporeal, trans-personal.”
  by C. S. Lewis Miracles (New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 91.
• “We have now three guiding principles before us. (1) That thought is distinct from the imagination which accompanies it. (2) That thought may be in the main sound even when the false images that accompany it are mistaken by the thinker for true ones. (3) That anyone who talks about things that cannot be seen, or touched, or heard, or the like, must inevitably talk as if they could be seen or touched or heard (e.g. must talk of ‘complexes’ and ‘repressions’ as if desires could really be tied up in bundles or shoved back; of ‘growth’ and ‘development’ as if institution could really grow like trees or unfold like flowers; of energy being ‘released’ as if it where an animal let out of a cage).”
  by C. S. Lewis Miracles (New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 73.

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