Explore Quotes by C. S. Lewis

In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by the group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say.

It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.

The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don't.

Other than heaven, the only place where one's heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell.

Regarding the debate about faith and works: It's like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most important.

The absent are easily refuted.

Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease?

You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the univerise in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.

The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other...

A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

Of course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking with cheerful seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water...If I find in myself a desire, which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them.

The Christian has a great advantage over other men, not by being less fallen than they, nor less doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that he is a fallen man in a fallen world.

There is no use in talking as if forgiveness were easy. For we find that the work of forgiveness has to be done over and over again.

I'd sooner live among people who don't cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards.

The holier a man becomes, the more he mourns over the unholiness which remains in him.

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.

Jesus Christ did not say, 'Go into the world and tell the world that it is quite right.'

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.