It is dull, Son of Adam, to drink without eating," said the Queen presently. "What would you like best to eat?""Turkish Delight, please, your Majesty," said Edmund. - C.S. Lewis
The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty. - C.S. Lewis
To generalize is to be an idiot," said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage. - C.S. Lewis
Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind. - C.S. Lewis
Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience. - C.S. Lewis
If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace. - C.S. Lewis
It must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. - C.S. Lewis
I had rather that the human race, having a certain quality in their lives, should continue for only a few centuries than that, losing freedom, friendship, dignity, and mercy, and learning to be quite content without them, they should continue for millions of millennia. - C.S. Lewis
The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. - C.S. Lewis
The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though our world might last a hundred years. - C.S. Lewis
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... - C.S. Lewis
You are never too old to set a new goal or to dream a new dream. - C.S. Lewis
The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature. - C.S. Lewis
God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain. - C.S. Lewis
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still. - C.S. Lewis
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. - C.S. Lewis
It is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, ‘You must do this. I can't. - C.S. Lewis
Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward towards success. - C.S. Lewis
Something of God... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself. - C.S. Lewis
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal. - C.S. Lewis
All joy... emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings. - C.S. Lewis
The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil’s whole structure away. - C.S. Lewis
We appear to be saying something very important aboutsomething: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings. - C.S. Lewis
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts. - C.S. Lewis
If there is a wasp in the room, I’d like to be able to see it. - C.S. Lewis
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair. - C.S. Lewis
If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it. - C.S. Lewis
We are what we believe we are! - C.S. Lewis
God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way. - C.S. Lewis
When man comes into the presence of God he will find, whether he wishes it or not, that all those things which seemed to make him so different from the men of other times, or even from his earlier self, have fallen off. He is back where he always was, where every man always is. - C.S. Lewis
How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask-half our great theological and metaphysical problems-are like that. - C.S. Lewis
If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed. - C.S. Lewis
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. - C.S. Lewis
If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. - C.S. Lewis
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. - C.S. Lewis
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. - C.S. Lewis
...if you give such a creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains: but there is no co-ordinating self which can recognise that 'I have had two pains'. - C.S. Lewis
You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you. - C.S. Lewis
Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self. - C.S. Lewis
[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation. - C.S. Lewis
And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to do another and harder and better one. - C.S. Lewis
The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career. - C.S. Lewis
Nos acercaremos a Dios no con el intento de evitar los sufrimientos inherentes a todos los amores, sino aceptándolos y ofreciéndoselos a Él, arrojando lejos toda armadura defensiva. Si es necesario que nuestros corazones se rompan y si Él elige el medio para que se rompan, que así sea. - C.S. Lewis
The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are. - C.S. Lewis
Feelings come and go, and when they come a good use can be made of them, but they cannot be our regular spiritual diet. - C.S. Lewis
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become. - C.S. Lewis
What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other. - C.S. Lewis
But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it. - C.S. Lewis
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity. - C.S. Lewis
It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. - C.S. Lewis
Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities. - C.S. Lewis
Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion. - C.S. Lewis
But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn't a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all? - no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it. That's how I'd defend it to H. But ten to one she'd see a hole in the defence. - C.S. Lewis
When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things. - C.S. Lewis
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. - C.S. Lewis
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. - C.S. Lewis
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us. - C.S. Lewis
The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not. - C.S. Lewis
It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests. - C.S. Lewis
Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny. - C.S. Lewis
We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. - C.S. Lewis
In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. - C.S. Lewis
Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity. - C.S. Lewis
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement. - C.S. Lewis
I felt sure that [Oyarsa] was what we call "good," but I wasn't sure whether I liked "goodness" so much as I had supposed. - C.S. Lewis
If you are foe, we do not fear you. If you are friend, your foes will be taught the fear of us. - C.S. Lewis
Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation bywhich a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. - Screwtape - C.S. Lewis
By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. - C.S. Lewis
I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more. - C.S. Lewis
We meet no ordinary people in our lives. - C.S. Lewis
I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been born in God's thought, and then made by God is the dearest, grandest, and most precious thing in all thinking."This is a prayer of contentment - C.S. Lewis
That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. - C.S. Lewis
The nearest thing we have to a defence against [the gods] (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one. - C.S. Lewis
He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) - C.S. Lewis
No time for better words, no time to unsay anything.-Til We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? - C.S. Lewis
A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest. - C.S. Lewis
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand. - C.S. Lewis
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. - C.S. Lewis
I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him. - C.S. Lewis
We read to know we are not alone. - C.S. Lewis
Lewis encourages his cancer-stricken and temporarily depressed wife that uncertainty rather than hopelessness is our cross. - C.S. Lewis
I seemed to hear God saying, "Put down your gun and we'll talk. - C.S. Lewis
Don't think of God in terms of forms, because forms are limited and God is unlimited. - C.S. Lewis
The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)... - C.S. Lewis
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. - C.S. Lewis
I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there's any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it. - C.S. Lewis
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. - C.S. Lewis
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. - C.S. Lewis
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. - C.S. Lewis
Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words. - C.S. Lewis
[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not. - C.S. Lewis
To me, re-reading my favorite books is like spending time with my best friends.I’d never be satisfied to limit myself to just one experience each with my favorite people. - C.S. Lewis
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books. - C.S. Lewis
Fun is closely related to Joy -- a sort of emotional froth arising from the play of instinct. - C.S. Lewis
الأكل والقراءة متعتان رائعتان .. وسوياً يصبحا أكثر إمتاعاً - C.S. Lewis
Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. - C.S. Lewis
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. - C.S. Lewis
I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? - C.S. Lewis
The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose, and that is to support the ultimate career. - C.S. Lewis
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. - C.S. Lewis
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality. - C.S. Lewis
To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God. - C.S. Lewis
Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves. - C.S. Lewis
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. - C.S. Lewis
Sometimes it is hard not to say, 'God forgive God.' Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him. - C.S. Lewis
We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts - C.S. Lewis
We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be. - C.S. Lewis
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C.S. Lewis
We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely - C.S. Lewis
There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself. As if the Good Lord had nothing better to do than exist! - C.S. Lewis
The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared. - C.S. Lewis
Nothing is yet in its true form. - C.S. Lewis
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained. - C.S. Lewis
The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive. - C.S. Lewis
لا أتخيل أن هناك من يستمتع جداً بكتاب .. ويقرأه مرة واحدة !!ـ - C.S. Lewis
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. - C.S. Lewis
Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life. - C.S. Lewis
He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. - C.S. Lewis
Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery. - C.S. Lewis
The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own. - C.S. Lewis
I gave in, and admitted that God was God. - C.S. Lewis
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. - C.S. Lewis
You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues. - C.S. Lewis
It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then. - C.S. Lewis
By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? - C.S. Lewis
It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence. - C.S. Lewis
and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed. - C.S. Lewis
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes. - C.S. Lewis
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,And field, and forest, as they wereReflected in a single mind)Like cast off clothes was left behindIn ashes, yet with hopes that she,Re-born from holy poverty,In lenten lands, hereafter mayResume them on her Easter Day."(Epitaph for Joy Davidman) - C.S. Lewis
You can make anything by writing. - C.S. Lewis
Hate obscures all distinctions. - C.S. Lewis
A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation. - C.S. Lewis
You can't know, you can only believe - or not. - C.S. Lewis
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. - C.S. Lewis
But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet. - C.S. Lewis
I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say. - C.S. Lewis
Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them. - C.S. Lewis
We are called to have faith, even in the darkest hour, and not grow faint or join with the cynics and the mockers. - C.S. Lewis
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all. - C.S. Lewis
The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual. - C.S. Lewis
If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were educated. But a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. - C.S. Lewis
Every story of conversion is a story of blessed defeat. - C.S. Lewis
It may be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies. - C.S. Lewis
We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. - C.S. Lewis
The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will. - C.S. Lewis
What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects--with their Christianity latent. - C.S. Lewis
Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain. - C.S. Lewis
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. - C.S. Lewis
We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: "I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely. - C.S. Lewis