CS Lewis Quotes

If you love The Chronicles of Narnia, then you will enjoy reading these CS Lewis quotes! C. S. Lewis was an inspiring person that shared so much wisdom through his words.

That’s why today we are celebrating him with a compilation of quotes that still resonate with us today!

Image shows a picture of C.S. Lewis with some of his quotes written behind him. — What’s your favorite CS Lewis quote?

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
“Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.”
“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
“A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged.”
“We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
“We are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.”
“When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.”
“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
“You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.”
“We are what we believe we are.”
“Courage, dear heart.”
“The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths―but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.”
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
“If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.”
“What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”
“We meet no ordinary people in our lives.”
“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
“A woman’s heart should be so close to God that a man should have to chase Him to find her.”
“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.”
“The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.”
“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
“Love is unselfishly choosing for another’s highest good.”
“Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”
“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.”
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
“True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
“To love at all is to be vulnerable.”
“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
“Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.”
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
“You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.”
“The Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.”
“Things always work according to their nature.”
“It is not your business to succeed, but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God.”
“Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.”
“The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”
“Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.”
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
“If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.”
“The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.”
“Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”
“Life is too deep for words, so don’t try to describe it, just live it.”
“You can make anything by writing.”
“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”
“People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.”
“Unless human reasoning is valid, no science can be true.”
“All get what they want; they do not always like it.”
“I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.”
“We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
“Forgiveness does not mean excusing.”
“We do not retreat from reality, we rediscover it.”
“Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.”
“Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.”
“Don’t shine so that others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see HIM.”
“Do not dare not to dare.”
“Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.”
“You cannot make men good by law.”
“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”
“This moment contains all moments.”
“My own eyes are not enough for me; I will see through those of others.”
“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
“We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.”
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private.”
“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
“Reason is the natural order of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.”
“A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.”
“One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.”
“All reality is iconoclastic.”
“In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s, we do not accept them easily enough.”
“God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.”
“There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.”
“Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.”
“Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”
“You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.”
“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”
“Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.”
“Things never happen the same way twice.”
“Joy is the serious business of heaven.”
“We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.”
“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different…”
“Too often, our prayer is self-centered rather than God-centered.”
“True friends face in the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals.”
“Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind.”
“In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”
“True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.”
“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.”
“The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not.”
“It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.”
“The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.”
“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”
“If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.”
“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them.”
“Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.”
“The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”
“In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”
“I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
“If you don’t admit any trouble, you’ll find there aren’t many.”
“Love is more than an emotion, it is a decision.”
“Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.”
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.”
“Seek Unity and you will find neither Unity nor Truth.Seek the light of truth, and you will find Unity and Truth.”
“You can’t know. You can only believe or not.”
“Reality is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.”
“Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”
“I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also harder to bear.”
“Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.”
“Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
“Of all the bad men, religious bad men are the worst.”
“Things never happen the same way twice.”
“If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly, but it’s still worth it.”
“God doesn’t want something from us. He simply wants us.”
“No one is told any story but their own.”
“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
“A noble friend is the best gift. A noble enemy is the next best.”
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
“The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that heaven must be our home.”
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
“One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.”
“There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.”
“Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar.”
“We meet no ordinary people in our lives.”
“there is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.”
“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
“Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”
“Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better.”
“You must ask for God’s help. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.”
“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”
“Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.”
“Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.”
“The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend.”
“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”
“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.”
“To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere.”
“With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.”
“You doubt your value. Don’t run from who you are.”
“Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
”It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.”
”My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”
”It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
”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.”
”Since it is so likely that [children] will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”
“But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”
“The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self — all your wishes and precautions — to Christ.”
“Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.”
“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, and in the end, despair.”
”I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
“This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”
“It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.”
“Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.”
“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
”Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…”
”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.”
”In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends, ‘Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.’ The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”
”Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
”Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
”He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.”
“There are only two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.’”
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
”Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”
“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
”If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

Thousands More Quotes For Any Occasion

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