Best C. S. Lewis Quotes

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

Faith... is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.

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

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.

God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth, and you will get neither.

The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

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.

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

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

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

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.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

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?

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.

I believe in Christianity as I believe in the rising sun; not because I see it, but by it I can see all else.

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!

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.

The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event.

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.

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.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.

I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

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.

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.