C.S. Lewis Quotes

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.

When the most important things in our life happen wequite often do not know, at the moment, what isgoing on.

When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason. Ho, my beauties!

We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage.

You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.

No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.

There is only one way fit for a man - Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.

We have not long to live in any event. Let us spend what is left in seeking the unpeopled world behind the sunrise.

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.

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves.

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

Badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.

But what manner of use would it be ploughing through that darkness?' asked Drinian. Use?' replied Reepicheep. 'Use, Captain?' If you mean by filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventures. And here is as great an adventure as I have ever heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours.

Oh Trees, Trees, Trees...wake. Don't you remember it? Don't you remember me? Dryads and hamadryads, come out, come [out] to me.

Don't judge a man by where he is, because you don't know how far he has come.

Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased.

If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain.

The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn't stayed put and all has to be done over again.

The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.

When we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived.

But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.

A man can't be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it.

Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy.

Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved.

Friends are like coals in a fire - together, they glow; apart, they grow cold.

Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.

One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

The death of a beloved is an amputation.

I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.

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

I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.

What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.

The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.

All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning...Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.

Humility is self-forgetfulness.

Nothing is yet in its true form.

One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself.

Pleasure that is its own pursuit is always bad pleasure.

Love is unselfishly choosing for another's highest good.

The higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be.

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.

Come, live with me and you'll know me.

A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility.

Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.

The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

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.

The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that's new to him.

I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.

This is where men, even the trustiest, fail us. Their heart is never so wholly given to any matter but that some trifle of a meal, or a drink, or a sleep, or a joke, or a girl, may come in between them and it, and then (even if you are a queen) you'll get no more good out of them until they've had their way.

You can't go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.

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.

Where I come from, they don't think much of men who are bossed about by their wives.

My son, by all means desist from kicking the venerable and enlightened Vizier: for as a costly jewel retains its value even if hidden in a dung-hill, so old age and discretion are to be respected even in the vile persons of our subjects. Desist therefore, and tell us what you desire and propose.

There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.