C. S. Lewis
British writer and scholar, 1898-1963
32 quotes.
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.
- Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
- All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
- All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
- Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.
- Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
- Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
- Faith … is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.
- Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
- Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
- God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
- Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.
- 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.
- I have often repented of speech but hardly ever of silence.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 with and, in the end, despair.
- Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.
- Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.
- Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
- Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
- Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.
- Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.
- The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.
- There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
- There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
- There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'
- To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
- We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.
- Where we find a difficulty we may always expect that a discovery awaits us.
- Our beliefs about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we will be.
- When first things are first, second things are not suppressed, but increased.