You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.
– C. S. Lewis
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
– C. S. Lewis
Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.
– C. S. Lewis
God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.
– C. S. Lewis
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.
– C. S. Lewis
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
– C. S. Lewis
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
– 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.
– C. S. Lewis
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look
ahead.
– C. S. Lewis
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable
explanation is that we were made for another world.
– C. S. Lewis
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
– C. S. Lewis
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a
matter of life and death to you.
– C. S. Lewis
Let’s pray that the human race never escapes Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
– C. S. Lewis
Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.
– C. S. Lewis
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What? You too? I
thought I was the only one.”
– C. S. Lewis
You play the hand you’re dealt. I think the game’s worthwhile.
– C. S. Lewis
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us
good because He loves us.
– C. S. Lewis
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for
meditation and true friendship.
– 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.
– C. S. Lewis
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
– C. S. Lewis
It is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are
the most grown-up.
– C. S. Lewis
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
– C. S. Lewis
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different?
– C. S. Lewis
I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first
fourteen years.
– C. S. Lewis
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get
either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
– 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.
– C. S. Lewis
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
– C. S. Lewis
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments
and yet not being disenchanted.
– C. S. Lewis
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
– C. S. Lewis
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
– C. S. Lewis
Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a
discord has been resolved.
– C. S. Lewis
The present is the point at which time touches eternity.
– C. S. Lewis
Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is
full of little men who think they are big themselves.
– 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.
– C. S. Lewis
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, the only thing it
cannot be is moderately important.
– 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.
– C. S. Lewis
God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.
– C. S. Lewis
We meet no ordinary people in our lives.
– C. S. Lewis
Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.
– C. S. Lewis
Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It
won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.
– C. S. Lewis
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to
fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely
being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
– C. S. Lewis
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
– C. S. Lewis
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal
world, but as animals they inhabit time.
– 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
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
– C. S. Lewis
All that we call human history – money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires,
slavery – is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will
make him happy.
– C. S. Lewis
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
– C. S. Lewis
We read to know that we are not alone.
– C. S. Lewis
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
– 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
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
– 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.
– C. S. Lewis
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our
lives.
– C. S. Lewis
A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an
obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives
in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour
later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived
a sheltered life by always giving in.
– C. S. Lewis
Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a
walking and talking adult.
– C. S. Lewis
Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
– C. S. Lewis
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to
love themselves as their neighbours.
– C. S. Lewis
Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.
– C. S. Lewis
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in
preferring civilised morality to savage morality.
– C. S. Lewis
We are what we believe we are.
– C. S. Lewis
A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next
three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon.
– C. S. Lewis
It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our
good temper down to ourselves.
– C. S. Lewis
The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden
turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
– 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 whatever happens has consequences, and it and
they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.
– C. S. Lewis
The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and
that is to support the ultimate career.
– C. S. Lewis
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
– C. S. Lewis
Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
– C. S. Lewis
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
Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong
turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road,
progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the
man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
– C. S. Lewis
Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the
result.
– C. S. Lewis
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
– C. S. Lewis