C S Lewis Quotes

“And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.”
― 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

“In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”
― C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

“In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble--because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out." - Mere Christianity”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Here I am going to say something which may come as a bit of a shock. God doesn't necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to be loved by Him. We don't start off being all that lovable, if we're honest. What makes people hard to love? Isn't it what is commonly called selfishness? Selfish people are hard to love because so little love comes out of them.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“And men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins”
― C.S Lewis

“Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.”
― C.S. Lewis

“My own plans are made. While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world into some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

“this is a book about something”
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

“God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“I have come to know a God who has a soft spot for rebels, who recruits people like the adulterer David, the whiner Jeremiah, the traitor Peter, and the human-rights abuser Saul of Tarsus. I have come to know a God whose Son made prodigals the heroes of his stories and the trophies of his ministry.”
― Philip Yancey

“Self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation. If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“To put it another way, pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can't he rouse us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be wakened, is the dream that all is well.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“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 am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God's grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources.”
― C.S. Lewis

“the fairy tale stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: The reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”
― C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories

“I know,” said Peter. “Perhaps better than anyone. But you can’t stay a child forever. To choose to speak into Echo’s Well is to choose illusion. To choose to avoid the responsibilities of being an adult. The real trick—the real choice—is to keep the best of the child you were, without forgetting when you grow up.
“It is the best of both worlds, Jack. Being a child is to believe in magic everywhere…
“…but even Peter Pan had to grow up one day.”
― James A. Owen, The Search for the Red Dragon

“A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“They [Narnia] are, perhaps, the greatest classics of children’s literature of the twentieth century.”
― Douglas Gresham

“My friendship you shall have, leanred Man," piped Reepicheep. "And any Dwarf--or Giant---in the army who does not give you good language shall have my sword to reckon with.”
― C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

“Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.”
― C.S. Lewis

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S Lewis

“Human nature will be the last part of nature to surrender to man.- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts....The tame animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only 'natural' animal--the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine of beasts.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“Você não pode voltar atrás e mudar o começo, mas pode começar onde está e mudar o final.”
― C.S. Lewis

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
~C S LEWIS~”
― Charmaine J. Forde

“Christianity is the prince of myths, the ultimate and final myth, what our scholar of medieval literature called a "true myth." By this he meant that Christianity was a mythological picture of the world with one important and extraordinary difference: its mythological features entered into history and time and wore a face.”
― Jason M. Baxter

“I am grateful to my friend, Kathy Keller, for reminding me that God doesn’t give us hypothetical grace but only actual grace. The point is that when we imagine all the worst case scenarios, we are imagining them without factoring in the presence and grace of God that would be there if they actually happened. As Kathy wrote in an email once, “God does’t play that game. He doesn’t inject hypothetical grace into your hypothetical nightmare situation ,so that you would know what it would actually feel like if you ever did end up in that situation.” He only gives grace for our actual situation. Replaying these scenarios over and over in our mind is therefore not at all helpful, and actually factors out what God would be doing were it to actually happen. What we’re imaging is actually life in that situation without God’s presence. Better to find something else to fill our minds with. C.S. Lewis makes a similar point when he says, “Remember one is given the strength to bear what happens, but not the 101 different things that might happen.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“I am grateful to my friend, Kathy Keller, for reminding me that God doesn’t give us hypothetical grace but only actual grace. The point is that when we imagine all the worst case scenarios, we are imagining them without factoring in the presence and grace of God that would be there if they actually happened. As Kathy wrote in an email once, “God doesn’t play that game. He doesn’t inject hypothetical grace into your hypothetical nightmare situation, so that you would know what it would actually feel like if you ever did end up in that situation.” He only gives grace for our actual situation. Replaying these scenarios over and over in our mind is therefore not at all helpful, and actually factors out what God would be doing were it to actually happen. What we’re imaging is actually life in that situation without God’s presence. Better to find something else to fill our minds with. C.S. Lewis makes a similar point when he says, “Remember one is given the strength to bear what happens, but not the 101 different things that might happen.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness