Letters of C. S. Lewis Quotes

“To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator. When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest t all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“I think I can understand that feeling about a housewife’s work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, miners, cars, government etc exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr. Johnson said, “To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavour”. (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So your job is the one for which all others exist…”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“Of Course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is)... Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.”
― C. S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931

“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, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my conversion. Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own' or one's 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one's real life is a phantom of one's imagination.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“I don't see how any degree of faith can exclude the dismay, since Christ's faith did not save Him from dismay in Gethsemane. 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, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“Don’t you simply love going to bed. To curl up warmly in a nice warm bed, in the lovely darkness. That is so restful and then gradually drift away into sleep…”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“We are ready to turn and twist the facts until they bear no resemblance to the original thing.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters Of C.S. Lewis

“How ones range of interests grows! Do you find a sort of double process going on with relation to books—that while the number of subjects one wants to read is increasing, the number of books on each which you find worth reading steadily decreases.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“How deep I am just now beginning to see: for I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ–in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931

“We have a little Icelandic Club in Oxford called the ‘Kólbitar’: 38 which means (literally) ‘coal-biters’, i.e. an Icelandic word for old cronies who sit round the fire so close that they look as if they were biting the coals.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931

“The doctrines of Christianity, or the many different theologies, are less true than the true myth because they are only attempts to translate the story, while God has expressed it all more adequately in the real incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.”
― Walter Hooper, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931

“I have seen death fairly often and never yet been able to find it anything but extraordinary and rather incredible. The real person is so very real, so obviously living and different from what is left that one cannot believe something has turned into nothing. It is not faith, it is not reason—just a ‘feeling’. ‘Feelings’ are in the long run a pretty good match for what we call our beliefs.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“The real difficulty is, isn’t it, to adapt ones steady beliefs about tribulation to this particular tribulation; for the particular, when it arrives, always seems so peculiarly intolerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“The process of living seems to consist of coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. They cannot sound otherwise to those who have not had the relevant experience; that is why there is no teaching of such truths possible and every generation starts from scratch.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths:”
― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931

“I have a capital story which is quite new to me. The hero is a certain Professor Alexander, a philosopher, at Leeds, but I have no doubt that the story is older than he. He is said to have entered a railway carriage with a large perforated cardboard box which he placed on his knees. The only other occupant was an inquisitive woman. She stood it as long as she could, and at last, having forced him into conversation and worked the talk round (you can fill in that part of the story yourself) ventured to ask him directly what was in the box. ‘A mongoose madam.’ The poor woman counted the telegraph posts going past for a while and again could bear her curiosity no further. ‘And what are you going to do with the mongoose?’ she asked. ‘I am taking it to a friend who is unfortunately suffering from delirium tremens.’ ‘And what use will a mongoose be to him?’ ‘Why, Madam, as you know, the people who suffer from that disease find themselves surrounded with snakes: and of course a mongoose eats snakes.’ ‘Good Heavens!’ cried the lady, ‘but you don’t mean that the snakes are real?’ ‘Oh dear me, no said the Professor with imperturbable gravity. ‘But then neither is the mongoose!”
― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931

“About death, I go through different moods, but the times when I can desire it are never, I think, those when this world seems harshest. On the contrary, it is just when there seems to be most of Heaven already here that I come nearest to longing for the patria. It is the bright frontispiece which whets one to read the story itself. All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status: always reminds, beckons, awakes desire. Our best havings are wantings.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“How awful it must have been for poor Lazarus who had actually died, got it all over, and then was brought back–to go through it all, I suppose, a few years later. I think he, not St. Stephen, ought really to be celebrated as the first martyr.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“What do ships, railways, mines, cars, government etc. exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr Johnson said, ‘To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavour’. (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So your job is the one for which all others exist . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“I find it so hard to start a fresh novel: I have a lazy desire to dally with the old favourites again”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“Isn’t it funny the way some combinations of words can give you – apart from their meaning – a thrill like music?”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“Of course, many acts which are sins against God are also injuries to our fellow-citizens, and must on that account, but only on that account, be made crimes. But of all the sins in the world, I should have thought homosexuality was the one that least concerns the State. We hear too much of the State. Government is at its best a necessary evil. Let's keep it in its place.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“So many things have now become interesting to me because at first I had to do them whether I liked them or not, and thus one is kicked into conquering new countries where one is afterwards at home.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931

“In his letter of 23 October 1928 Warnie wrote of a sea voyage to Hong Kong. ‘The most interesting person on board,’ he said, ‘was the Chief Engineer who was a character straight out of Kipling–such a man as I had always believed never existed outside novels…I first came across him one night after dinner when a few of us collected in the saloon for a mouthful of the port, and McAndrew’s Hymn being mentioned, he expressed his warmest approval of it…This and some more chat led to an invitation to adjourn to his room and inspect “ma buiks”. It was a severe shock after a discussion on Kipling to arrive at his room and come bolt under a withering collection of philosophy–Spencer, Comte, and similar books. I had to mumble something about having no philosophy, which was met with “When ye say ye haaaave no pheelawsophy, Cap’n, ye only mean ye haaave a bad pheelawsophy.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931

“Are you often struck, when you become sufficiently intimate with other people to know something of their development, how late their lives begin so to speak? I mean these men you meet who seem to have read everything, done everything, and yet they were pure barbarians until they left school, and had turned twenty perhaps before they began to be interested in the things that interest them now?”
― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931