Explore Quotes by C. S. Lewis

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

To the glistening Eastern sea, I give you Queen Lucy, the Valiant. To the great Western Wood, King Edmund the Just. To the radiant Southern sun, Queen Susan, the Gentle; and to the clear Northern sky I give you King Peter, the Magnificent. Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen. May your wisdom grace us 'til the stars rain down from the heavens.

Narnia! It's all in the wardrobe just like I told you!

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.

She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.

Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.

Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan.

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. 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. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye).

When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

I was with book, as a woman is with child.