Explore Quotes by C. S. Lewis

God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.

I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't.

I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.

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

Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.

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

There is someone that I love even though I don't approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is......me.

The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one's life.

The humblest praise most, while cranks & malcontents praise least. Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible

Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.

It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.

The doors of hell are locked from the inside!

If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.

Forgive us as we forgive- we are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse Gods mercy for ourselves.

When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only person in the world.

A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women.

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.

Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.