C. S. Lewis
writer, poet, university teacher, novelist, philosopher, medievalist, autobiographer, literary scholar, theologian, essayist, screenwriter, literary critic, science fiction writer, children's writer, philologist, linguist, literary historian, broadcaster, man of letters
Read on Wikipedia1898 – 1963
All Quotes by C. S. Lewis
“In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.”
“I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; 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.”
“Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.”
“If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.”
“Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, on their view, exist...”
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.”
“I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”
“My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.”
“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.”
“Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.”
“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 vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”
“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
“When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.”
“The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.”
“Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
“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!”
“Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.”
“A sensible human once said, "If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit"; and again, "She's the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression."”
“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
“We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may 'conquer' them.”
“It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.”
“What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”
“I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people — all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”
“Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.”
“Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up – painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other — that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.”
“When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest eldil, is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.”
“I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are his will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless he bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?”
“Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him.”
“You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.”
“Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.”
“I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment...”
“[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death.”
“Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?" "Hush," he said sternly. "Do not blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind — ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind — is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.”
“Milton was right," said my Teacher. "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery.”
“There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”
“'God!' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape.'In our grammar God is a noun' said the Spirit.”
“Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.”
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”
“Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us... While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?”
“'It comes, it comes!' they sang. 'Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.' One dreadful glance over my shoulder I essayed — not long enough to see (or did I see?) the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes. Screaming, I buried my face in the fold of the Teacher's robe. 'The morning! The morning!' I cried. 'I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.'”
“They would say," he answered, "that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
“You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
“The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.' There is consequently a phatic hiatus.”
“They have an engine called the Press whereby the people are deceived.”
“Their own strength has betrayed them. They have...pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads.”
“There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.”
“If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.”
“Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. It does involve the belief that God loves man and for his sake became man and died.”
“My form remains one, though the matter in it changes continually. I am, in that respect, like a curve in a waterfall.”
“If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
“Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.”
“History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.”
“As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.”
“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.”
“100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”
“If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.”
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time.”
“Who believes in Aslan nowadays?”
“This is where dreams—dreams, do you understand—come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.”
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.”
“Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us... While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?”
“The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
“All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia 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 which every chapter is better than the one before.”
“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
“When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.”
“This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.”
“The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.”
“There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know.”
“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where 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; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again....God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.”
“Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger—according to the way you react to it.”
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”
“Badness is only spoiled goodness.”
“Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.”
“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.”
“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.”
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”
“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
“We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.”
“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
“He [God] lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.”
“Now, to-day, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.”
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
“Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”
“A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”
“If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just 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. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get neither.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
“I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.”
“You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.”
“Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”
“He [the devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.”
“The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.”
“What can you ever really know of other people's souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books.”
“But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.”
“Christian Apocalyptic offers us no such hope. It does not even foretell, (which would be more tolerable to our habits of thought) a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without; an extinguisher popped onto the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain rung down on the play — "Halt!"”
“The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.”
“The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question "What if this present were the world's last night?" is equally relevant.”
“Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that "this present" might be "the world's last night"; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“For what comes is Judgment: happy are those whom it finds labouring in their vocations, whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or laying good plans to deliver humanity a hundred years hence from some great evil. The curtain has indeed now fallen. Those pigs will never in fact be fed, the great campaign against White Slavery or Governmental Tyranny will never in fact proceed to victory. No matter; you were at your post when the Inspection came.”
“I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.”
“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”
“The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson: 'Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.'”
“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.”
“Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.”
“Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”
“The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?”
“I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their own way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. "Reflect" is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image.”
“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
“'Who are you? Nobody. Who is Porridge? THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.'”
“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
“… in such a matter he would never have been guided by his first thoughts (which would probably have been right) nor even by his twenty-first (which would have at least been explicable). Beyond doubt he would have prolonged deliberation till his hundred-and-first; and they would be infallibly and invincibly wrong. This is what always happens to the deliberations of a simple man who thinks he is a subtle one.”
“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
“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.”
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere... God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”
“Nothing is yet in its true form.”
“I have always — at least, ever since I can remember — had a kind of longing for death."”
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.”
“Ah, Psyche," I said, "have I made you so little happy as that?”
“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, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”
“'Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?'”
“Die before you Die. There is no chance after.”
“And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and, oh, gloriously she did) it was for another’s sake. The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming. The pillars on the far side of the pool flushed with his approach. I cast down my eyes.”
“How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.”
“We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
“There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.”
“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."”
“Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."”
“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
“Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food more than another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
“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.”
“Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.”
“Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?”
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose that you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it? … Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”
“I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?”
“It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness and chivalry “masculine” when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as “feminine”.”
“Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask — half our great theological and metaphysical problems — are like that.”
“I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.”
“But then again of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“Not my idea of God, but God.”
“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'”
“It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.”
“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.”
“What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.”
““We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.””
“The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles.”
“I am to talk about Apologetics. Apologetics means of course Defence. The first question is — what do you propose to defend? Christianity, of course...”
“The standard of permanent Christianity must be kept clear in our minds and it is against that standard that we must test all contemporary thought. In fact, we must at all costs not move with the times.”
“If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.”
“The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements.”
“As image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.”
“The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.”
“If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.”
“We are what we believe we are.”
“Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us... While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”
“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
“We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”
“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
“We are what we believe we are.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”
“When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you'd been the only man in the world.”
“History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.”
“The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
“We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ.”
“Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.”
“'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'”
“Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.”
“What I call my 'self' now is hardly a person at all. It's mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.”
“History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.”
“A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”
“Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”
“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.”
“Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them.”
“Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”
“Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”
“Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”
“We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.”
“You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
“The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.”
“With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.”
“Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.”
“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.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”
“Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
“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.'”
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
“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.”
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
“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.'”
“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.”
“I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.”
“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.”
“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”
“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”
“An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.”
“Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”
“Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us... While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?”
“Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.”
“Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”
“It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“What I call my 'self' now is hardly a person at all. It's mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.”
“How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.”
“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
“Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.”
“I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”
“Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
“A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.”
“I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”
“Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.”
“'Good English' is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.”
“Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”
“Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.”
“I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do —\xa0so much have I enjoyed it.”
“I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.”
“The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull…”
“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
“Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.”
“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'”
“Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.”
“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”
“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.”
“Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.”
“Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.”
“A man, an adult, is precisely what is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy.”
“There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.”
“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.”
“Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.”
“What I call my 'self' now is hardly a person at all. It's mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.”
“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.”
“I'm tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.”
“I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.”
“Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.”
“If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.”
“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.”
“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
“I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.”
“The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.”
“He [the child] does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
“I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.”
“Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.”
“Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.”
“There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.”
“The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.”
“Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.”
“A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can't quite place. I think the something is 'the whole quality of life as we actually experience it.'”
“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.”
“A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis.”
“The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered. For all its vast spaces it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered by-ways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?”
“I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.”
“I wrote the books I should have liked to read. That's always been my reason for writing. People won't write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
“Looking for God—or Heaven—by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.”
“You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
“[M]y friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”
“The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.”
“He came in sight of a pass guarded by armed men. ‘you cannot pass … Do you not know that all this country belongs to the Spirit of the Age? … Here Enlightenment, take this fugitive to our Master.’”
“And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.”
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
“Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”
“Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.”
“Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
“God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.”
“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”
“What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all".”