C.S. Lewis

"So far as is possible our knowledge should be checked and supplemented, not derived, from the dictionary."

I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda; they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental; and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against…

Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct…

Well, sir, if things are real, they're there all the time. Are they? said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks…

Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect.

First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If…

Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together. If the voice within us does not say this it is not the voice of Eros.

It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it if you think like this. You may have b…

In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing the…

No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.

It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other…

You can't go on 'seeing through'things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To 'see through'all things is the same as not to see.

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do i…

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask…

She did not shut it properly because she knew that it is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one.

If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most, or else just silly.

Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?

Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.

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…

He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have…

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing 'to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from 'my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, a…

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty ma…

I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity.

What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.

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 t…

The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our selfhood; it has made appetite its…

A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all'and more amusing.

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a d…

Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices…

Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.

Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies,…

In your life you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some that you wish you never have to…

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existen…

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

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things'the beauty, the me…

All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in…

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

If God "foresaw" our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line... You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less…

Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

I was not born to be free---I was born to adore and obey.