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C. S. Lewis Quotes |
C. S. Lewis
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C. S. Lewis
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
C. S. Lewis
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
C. S. Lewis
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
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
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
C. S. Lewis
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.
C. S. Lewis
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C. S. Lewis
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
C. S. Lewis
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.
C. S. Lewis
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
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
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
C. S. Lewis
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C. S. Lewis
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
C. S. Lewis
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C. S. Lewis
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
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
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.
C. S. Lewis
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.
C. S. Lewis
Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
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
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
C. S. Lewis
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
C. S. Lewis
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
C. S. Lewis
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
C. S. Lewis
You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
C. S. Lewis
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.
C. S. Lewis
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
C. S. Lewis
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
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
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
C. S. Lewis
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.
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
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.
C. S. Lewis
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
C. S. Lewis
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
C. S. Lewis