Explore Quotes by C. S. Lewis

The Scotch catechism says that man's chief end is 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.' But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.

If nothing in this world satisfies me, perhaps it is because I was made for another world.

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.

At the end of all things, the blessed will say, 'We never lived anywhere but in heaven.'

We do not want to merely “see” beauty. We want to be united with it, to receive it into ourselves, to become part of it.

Away with tears and fears and troubles! United in wedlock with the eternal Godhead Itself, our nature ascends into the Heaven of Heavens. So it would be impious to call ourselves 'miserable.' On the contrary, Man is a creature whom the Angels-were they capable of envy-would envy. Let us lift up our hearts!

Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God has made the world- that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colors and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His head' as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher. He'd be either a lunatic on a level with a man who says he's a poached egg or else he'd be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.

Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will

One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself.

If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain.

Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says; we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.

Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things.

Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want

The Glory of God, and, as our only means of glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ.

Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description.

When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place [if we anticipate and look for it, rather than wallow in our 'supposed loss'. It can be helpful to think of the loss of that blessing as simply necessary to make way for another different blessing].