C.s. Lewis Quotes

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

~ C.s. Lewis

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

~ C.s. Lewis

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.

~ C.s. Lewis

The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.

~ C.s. Lewis

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

~ C.s. Lewis

I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the horses the new strength of fear for the last mill so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.

~ C.s. Lewis

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

~ C.s. Lewis

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, What? You too? I thought I was the only one. ... It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision - it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.

~ C.s. Lewis

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.' For in this love 'to divide is not to take away.

~ C.s. Lewis

In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.

~ C.s. Lewis

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

~ C.s. Lewis

It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.

~ C.s. Lewis

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

~ C.s. Lewis

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.

~ C.s. Lewis

The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own.

~ C.s. Lewis

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

~ C.s. Lewis

The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)...

~ C.s. Lewis

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

~ C.s. Lewis

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

~ C.s. Lewis

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

~ C.s. Lewis

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.

~ C.s. Lewis

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

Do not dare not to dare.

~ C.s. Lewis

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

~ C.s. Lewis

No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.

~ C.s. Lewis

When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.

~ C.s. Lewis

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

~ C.s. Lewis

Aslan: You doubt your value. Don't run from who you are.

~ C.s. Lewis

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. 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.

~ C.s. Lewis

Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North!

~ C.s. Lewis

You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.

~ C.s. Lewis

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.

~ C.s. Lewis

I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' 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? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.

~ C.s. Lewis

All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.

~ C.s. Lewis

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

~ C.s. Lewis

She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.

~ C.s. Lewis

Adventures are never fun while you're having them.

~ C.s. Lewis

His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, 'God can.' It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

~ C.s. Lewis

Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.

~ C.s. Lewis

[Wither] knew that everything was lost. It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him. What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void. The indicative mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him.

~ C.s. Lewis