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

“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

“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

“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

“Young men are supposed to think themselves immortal, but the subject is not very often out of my mind for a long time together.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931