Explore Quotes by C. S. Lewis

Your place in Heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it.

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.

Nothing is really ours until we share it.

If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

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

Earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.

Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.

Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of lucifer.... An instrument strung, but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician

Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.

Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way.

Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in

The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back to the simple principles, which we're so anxious not to see.

In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.

I have often repented of speech but hardly ever of silence.

To be in love involves the most irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness.

Obedience is the road to freedom.

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

All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job...And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legends or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I've read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff.

All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it, tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.'