C.S. Lewis Quotes

“And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to do another and harder and better one.”

“The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.”

“Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners.”

“All names will soon be restored to their proper owners.”

“What do they teach them at these schools?”

“Humour is...the all-consoling and...the all-excusing, grace of life.”

“A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others...thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people's rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.”

“Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. (And) There is no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Righ and Wrong are.”

“I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.”

“The worst of sleeping out of doors is that you wake up so dreadfully early. And when you wake up you have to get up because the ground is so hard you are uncomfortable. And it makes matters worse if there is nothing but apples for breakfast and you have had nothing but apples for supper the night before.”

“It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.”

“We read to know we are not alone.”

“Total war is the most humane in the long run.”

“No time for better words, no time to unsay anything. -Til We Have Faces”

“If you simply try to tell the truth you will, nine times out of ten, be original without ever having noticed it.”

“The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.”

“Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.”

“I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.... I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.”

“Hatred obscures all distinctions.”

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.”

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

“Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become a child again, even now... You have gone wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.”

“There is someone I accept even though I do not approve of all he does...and that someone is me”

“Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.”

“Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”