The rule for us all is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Friendship
We ought to give thanks for all fortune: it is good, because it is good, if bad, because it works in us patience, humility and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Fortune
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
Topics: Books, Literature, Reality
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adults themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence…. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
—C. S. Lewis
Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth, and you will get neither.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Heaven, Aspirations, Goals
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you’re looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Pride, Miscellaneous
It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Religion
I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Evil
We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: God
They tell me, Lord, that when I seem
To be in speech with you.
Since but one voice is heard, it.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Prayer
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Happiness
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.
—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
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Experience
Do not dare not to dare.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Adventure
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Grief, Grieving
The thing is to rely on God. The time will come when you will regard all this misery as a small price to pay for having been brought to that dependence. Meanwhile, the trouble is that relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing has yet been done.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Morning, God
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
—C. S. Lewis
But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Age
It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Miracles
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Honor
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Creativity, Truth, To Be Born Everyday
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Reason
The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Truth
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Pleasure, Excitement, Joy
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
—C. S. Lewis
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Marriage
I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God- it changes me.
—C. S. Lewis
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Religion
Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Belief, Faith
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Rudyard Kipling British Children’s Books Writer
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan Irish-born British Playwright
- J. K. Rowling English Novelist
- Mary Wollstonecraft English Writer, Feminist
- Ouida (Maria Louise Rame) English Novelist
- Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
- A. A. Milne British Humorist, Children’s Writer
- Ursula K. Le Guin Science-fiction writer
- Enoch Powell British Politician
- Carl Sandburg American Poet, Historian
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