C.S. Lewis Quotes

“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.”

“To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”

“Joy is the serious business of heaven.”

“A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”

“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”

“What it said was something like this—at least this is the sense of it though the poetry, when you read it there, was better: Make your choice, adventurous Stranger; Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had. ‘No fear!’ said Polly. ‘We don’t want any danger.’ ‘Oh but don’t you see it’s no good!’ said Digory. ‘We can’t get out of it now. We shall always be wondering what else would have happened if we had struck the bell. I’m not going home to be driven mad by always thinking of that. No fear!‘”

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

“The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”

“Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.”

“All the things he had said to make himself believe that she was good and kind and that her side was really the right side sounded to him silly now.”

“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

“Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.”

“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”

“Our silence about grief serves no one. We can’t heal if we can’t grieve; we can’t forgive if we can’t grieve. We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend. C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.’ We can’t rise strong when we’re on the run.”

″‘The reason there’s no use looking,’ said Mr. Beaver, ‘is that we know already where he’s gone!’ Everyone stared in amazement. ‘Don’t you understand?’ said Mr. Beaver. ‘He’s gone to her, to the White Witch. He has betrayed us all.‘”

″‘This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!’ thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. ‘I wonder is that more moth balls?’ she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hands. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. ‘This is very queer,’ she said, and went on a step or two further.”

“Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia.”

″‘Why, Sir,’ said Lucy. ‘I think – I don’t know – but I think I could be brave enough.‘”

“At that moment they heard from behind them a loud noise—a great cracking, deafening noise as if a giant had broken a giant’s plate.... The Stone Table was broken into two pieces by a great crack that ran down it from end to end; and there was no Aslan.”

″‘It was all Edmund’s doing, Aslan,’ Peter was saying. ‘We’d have been beaten if it hadn’t been for him. The Witch was turning our troops into stone right and left. But nothing would stop him. He fought his way through three ogres to where she was just turning one of your leopards into a statue. And when he reached her he had the sense to bring his sword smashing down on her wand instead of trying to go for her directly and simply getting made a statue himself for his pains.‘”

″‘Then be off home as quick as you can,’ said the Faun, ‘and – c-can you ever forgive me for what I meant to do?’ ‘Why, of course I can,’ said Lucy, shaking him heartily by the hand. ‘And I do hope you won’t get into dreadful trouble on my account.‘”

″‘She is a perfectly terrible person,’ said Lucy. ‘She calls herself the Queen of Narnia thought she has no right to be queen at all...And she can turn people into stone and do all kinds of horrible things. And she has made a magic so that it is always winter in Narnia—always winter, but it never gets to Christmas. And she drives about on a sledge, drawn by reindeer, with her wand in her hand and a crown on her head.’

“Lucy felt very frightened, but she felt inquisitive and excited as well. She looked back over her shoulder and there, between the dark tree-trunks, she could still see the open doorway of the wardrobe and even catch a glimpse of the empty room from which she had set out. (She had, of course, left the door open, for she knew that it is a very silly thing to shut oneself into a wardrobe.) It seemed to be still daylight there. “I can always get back if anything goes wrong,” thought Lucy.”

“They had been just as surprised as Edmund when they saw the winter vanishing and the whole wood passing in a few hours or so from January to May. They hadn’t even known for certain (as the Witch did) that this was what would happen when Aslan came to Narnia. But they all knew that it was her spells which had produced the endless winter; and therefore they all knew when this magic spring began that something had gone wrong, and badly wrong, with the Witch’s schemes.”

“And now we come to one of the nastiest things in this story. Up to that moment Edmund had been feeling sick, and sulky, and annoyed with Lucy for being right, but he hadn’t made up his mind what to do. When Peter suddenly asked him the question he decided all at once to do the meanest and most spiteful thing he could think of. He decided to let Lucy down.”

“And Edmund for the first time in this story felt sorry for someone besides himself. It seemed so pitiful to think of those little stone figures sitting there all the silent days and all the dark nights, year after year, till the moss grew on them and at last even their faces crumbled away.”

“At last the Turkish Delight was all finished and Edmund was looking very hard at the empty box and wishing that she would ask him whether he would like some more. Probably the Queen knew quite well what he was thinking; for she knew, though Edmund did not, that this was enchanted Turkish Delight and that anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.”

“All the things he had said to make himself believe that she was good and kind and that her side was really the right side sounded to him silly now.”

“But as for Aslan himself, the Beavers and the children didn’t know what to do or say when they saw him. People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the children had ever thought so, they were cured of it now. For when they tried to look at Aslan’s face they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes; and then they found they couldn’t look at him and went all trembly.”

“And they themselves grew and changed as the years passed over them. And Peter became a tall and deep chested man and a great warrior, and he was called King Peter the Magnificent. And Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet and the Kings of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage. And she was called Queen Susan the Gentle. Edmund was a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgement. He was called King Edmund the Just. But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden haired, and all Princes in those parts desired her to be their Queen, and her own people called her Queen Lucy the Valiant.”

“Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree-tops.”

Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind.

″[…] this signifies that Aslan will be our good lord, whether he means us to live or die. And all’s one, for that. Now, by my counsel, we shall all kneel and kiss his likeness, and then all shake hands one with another, as true friends that may shortly be parted.”

“Up till now neither Caspian nor the others had really been thinking of a war. They had some vague idea, perhaps, of an occasional raid on some Human farmstead or of attacking a party of hunters, if it ventured too far into these southern wilds.”

″(Lucy) had once known them better than the stars of our own world, because as a Queen in Narnia she had gone to bed much later than as a child in England.”

“It was indeed a shattering loss; for this was an enchanted horn and, whenever you blew it, help was certain to come to you, wherever you were.”

″[Caspian was] about as good a friend as a chap could have. And last time he was only a few years older than me. And to see that old man with a white beard, and to remember Caspian as he was the morning we captured the Lone Islands, or in the fight with the Sea Serpent—oh, it’s frightful. It’s worse than coming back and finding him dead.”

″‘And there were Dwarfs. And there were lovely little Fauns in all the woods. They had feet like goats. And—’ ‘That’s all nonsense, for babies,’ said the King sternly.”

“And if I hadn’t believed in (Aslan) before, I would now. Back there among the Humans the people who laughed at Aslan would have laughed at stories about Talking Beasts and Dwarfs. Sometimes I did wonder if there really was such a person as Aslan: but then sometimes I wondered if there were really people like you. Yet there you are.”

“You see, Aslan didn’t tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he’s up, I shouldn’t wonder. But that doesn’t let us off following the sign.”

″‘Yes—that and other things,’ said Peter, his face very solemn. ‘I can’t tell it to you all. There were things he wanted to say to Su and me because we’re not coming back to Narnia.‘”

“And if Aslan himself comes, (Cair Paravel) would be the best place for meeting him too, for every story says that he is the son of the great Emperor-over-the-Sea, and over the sea he will pass.”

“The children also put on mail shirts and helmets; a sword and shield were found for Edmund and a bow for Lucy—Peter and Susan were of course already carrying their gifts.”

“But when day came, with a sprinkle of rain, and he looked about him and saw on every side unknown woods, wild heaths, and blue mountains, he thought how large and strange the world was and felt frightened and small.”

“Raw meat is not a nice thing to fill one’s pockets with, but they folded it up in fresh leaves and made the best of it. They were all experienced enough to know that they would feel quite differently about these squashy and unpleasant parcels when they had walked long enough to be really hungry.”

“Miraz weeded them out. Belisar and Uvilas were shot with arrows on a hunting party: by chance, it was pretended. All the great house of the Passarids he sent to fight giants on the northern frontier till one by one they fell.”

“Then Patterwig came back with the nut and Caspian ate it and after that Patterwig asked if he could take any messages to other friends.”

″‘And look at those other steps—the broad, shallow ones—going up to that doorway. It must have been the door into the great hall.’ ‘Ages ago, by the look of it,’ said Edmund.”

“Why, if not, we should be as able to win it without the King’s grace as with him. For I need not tell your Lordship that Miraz is no very great captain. And after that, we should be both victorious and kingless.”

″‘And that means,’ continued Edmund, ‘that, once you’re out of Narnia, you have no idea how Narnian time is going. Why shouldn’t hundreds of years have gone past in Narnia while only one year has passed for us in England?‘”

″‘But they won’t believe me!’ said Lucy. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Aslan.”

″‘It is hard for you, little one,’ said Aslan. ‘But things never happen the same way twice. It has been hard for us all in Narnia before now.‘”

“Wherever they went in the little town of Beruna it was the same. Most of the people fled, a few joined them. When they left the town they were a larger and a merrier company.”

“In the center was the Stone itself—a stone table, split right down the center, and covered with what had once been writing of some kind: but ages of wind and rain and snow had almost worn them away in old times when the Stone Table had stood on the hill top, and the Mound had not yet been built above it.”

″‘Lord King, slay me speedily as a great traitor: for by my silence I have destroyed your son.’ And [Drinian] told [Caspian] the story. Then Caspian caught up a battle-axe and rushed upon the Lord Drinian to kill him, and Drinian stood still as a stock for the death blow. But when the axe was raised, Caspian suddenly threw it away and cried out, ‘I have lost my queen and my son: shall I lose my friend also?’ And he fell upon the Lord Drinian’s neck and embraced him and both wept, and their friendship was not broken.”

“Then he did a very brave thing. He knew it wouldn’t hurt him quite as much as it would hurt a human […] But he knew it would hurt him badly enough; and so it did. With his bare foot he stamped on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth.”

“For the last few minutes Jill had been feeling that there was something she must remember at all costs. And now she did. But it was dreadfully hard to say it. She felt as if huge weights were laid on her lips. At last, with an effort that seemed to take all the good out of her, she said: ‘There’s Aslan.‘”

″‘If you were coming along here when it was half dark, you could easily think those piles of rock were giants. Look at that one, now! You could almost imagine that the lump on top was a head […] And the things sticking out on each side are quite like ears. They’d be horribly big, but then I daresay giants would have big ears, like elephants. And—o-o-o-h!‘”

“Puddleglum’s question annoyed her because, deep down inside her, she was already annoyed with herself for not knowing the Lion’s lesson quite so well as she felt she ought to have known it. This annoyance, added to the misery of being very cold and tired, made her say, ‘Bother the signs.’ She didn’t perhaps quite mean it.”

“What had been the use of promising one another that they would not on any account set the Knight free, if they were now to do so the first time he happened to call upon a name they really cared about?”

“And Jill and Eustace were always friends.”

“And then it was not a toy lion, but a real lion, The Real Lion, just as she had seen him on the mountain beyond the world’s end. And a smell of all sweet-smelling things there are filled the room. But there was some trouble in Jill’s mind, though she could not think what it was... The Lion told her to repeat the signs, and she found that she had forgotten them all. At that, a great horror came over her.”

″‘Once and for all,’ said the prisoner, ‘I adjure you to set me free. By all fears and all loves, by the bright skies of Overland, by the great Lion, by Aslan himself, I charge you—‘”

″[…] it was the old King on a bed, very pale and still. They set him down. The Prince knelt beside him and embraced him. They could see King Caspian raising his hand to bless his son. And everyone cheered, but it was a half-hearted cheer, for they all felt that something was going wrong. Then suddenly the King’s head fell back upon his pillows, the musicians stopped and there was a dead silence.”

″‘Steady pace, now,’ he said. ‘Don’t look frightened, whatever you do. We’ve done the silliest thing in the world by coming at all: but now that we are here, we’d best put a bold face on it.‘”

“You were thinking how nice it would have been if Aslan hadn’t put the instructions on the stones of the ruined city till after we’d passed it. And then it would have been his fault, not ours. So likely, isn’t it? No. We must own up to it. We’ve only four signs to go by, and we’ve muffed the first three.”

“But when Scrubb shook hands with Jill, he said, ‘So long, Jill. Sorry I’ve been a funk and so ratty. I hope you get safe home,’ and Jill said, ‘So long, Eustace. And I’m sorry I’ve been such a pig.’ And this was the first time they had ever used Christian names, because one didn’t do it at school.”

“There are no accidents. Our guide is Aslan; and he was there when the giant King caused the letters to be cut, and he knew already all things that would come of them; including this.”

″‘I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian even if there isn’t any Narnia.‘”

“And there, on the golden gravel of the bed of the stream, lay King Caspian, dead, with the water flowing over him like liquid glass […] And all three stood and wept. Even the Lion wept: great Lion-tears, each tear more precious than the Earth would be if it was a single solid diamond. And Jill noticed that Eustace looked neither like a child crying, nor like a boy crying and wanting to hide it, but like a grown-up crying.”

“Nobody, least of all Jadis, could have missed at that range. The bar struck the Lion fair between the eyes. It glanced off and fell with a thud in the grass. The Lion came on. Its walk was neither slower nor faster than before, you could not tell whether it even knew it had been hit. Though its soft pads made no noise, you could feel the earth shake beneath their weight.”

″‘Well, I was with [Caspian] on that journey: with him and Reepicheep the Mouse, and the Lord Drinian and all of them […] and what I want to say is this, that I’m the King’s man; and if this parliament of owls is any sort of plot against the King, I’m having nothing to do with it.‘”

“There was nothing else to be done. The three travelers scrambled to their feet and joined hands. One wanted the touch of a friend’s hand at a moment like that.”

“A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard.”

“I think (and Digory thinks too) that her mind was of a sort which cannot remember that quiet place at all, and however often you took her there and however long you left her there, she would still know nothing about it. Now that she was left alone with the children, she took no notice of either of them. And that was like her too. In Charn she had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical.”

“I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subjects to do it on. Bless my soul, you’ll be telling me next that I ought to have asked the guinea-pigs’ permission before I used them! No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.”

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

“Come in by the gold gates or not at all, Take of my fruit for others or forbear, For those who steal or those who climb my wall Shall find their heart’s desire and find despair. -Inscription on the Garden Gate”

Aren’t all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.‘s lover. Now it’s like an empty house.

″‘You see, friends,’ he said, ‘that before the new, clean world I gave you is seven hours old, a force of evil has already entered it; waked and brought hither by this son of Adam.’ The Beasts, even Strawberry, all turned their eyes on Digory till he felt that he wished the ground would swallow him up. ‘But do not be cast down,’ said Aslan, still speaking to the Beasts. ‘Evil will come of that evil, but it is still a long way off, and I will see to it that the worst falls upon myself. In the meantime, let us take such order that for many hundred years yet this shall be a merry land in a merry world. And as Adam’s race has done the harm, Adam’s race shall help to heal it.‘”

“There was no doubt that the Witch had got over her faintness; and now that one saw her in our own world, with ordinary things around her, she fairly took one’s breath away. In Charn she had been alarming enough: in London, she was terrifying. For one thing, they had not realized till now how very big she was. […] But even her height was nothing compared with her beauty, her fierceness, and her wildness. She looked ten times more alive than most of the people one meets in London. Uncle Andrew was bowing and rubbing his hands and looking, to tell the truth, extremely frightened. He seemed a little shrimp of a creature beside the Witch. And yet, as Polly said afterward, there was a sort of likeness between her face and his, something in the expression. It was the look that all wicked Magicians have, the ‘Mark’ which Jadis had said she could not find in Digory’s face.”

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

″‘He thinks great folly, child,’ said Aslan. ‘This world is bursting with life for these few days because the song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air and rumbles in the ground. It will not be so for long. But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good! But I will give him the only gift he is still able to receive.‘”

“‘You met the Witch?’ said Aslan in a low voice which had the threat of a growl in it. ‘She woke up,’ said Digory wretchedly. And then, turning very white, ‘I mean, I woke her. Because I wanted to know what would happen if I struck a bell. Polly didn’t want to. It wasn’t her fault. I—I fought her. I know I shouldn’t have. I think I was a bit enchanted by the writing under the bell.’ ‘Do you?’ asked Aslan; still speaking very low and deep. ‘No,’ said Digory. ‘I see now I wasn’t. I was only pretending.‘”

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.

The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

“The last figure of all was the most interesting—a woman even more richly dressed than the others, very tall (but every figure in that room was taller than the people of our world), with a look of such fierceness and pride that it took your breath away. Yet she was beautiful too. Years afterward, when he was an old man, Digory said he had never in all his life known a woman so beautiful. It is only fair to add that Polly always said she couldn’t see anything specially beautiful about her.”

“But what she noticed first was a bright red wooden tray with a number of rings on it. They were in pairs - a yellow one and a green one together, than a little space, and then another yellow one and another green one. They were no bigger than ordinary rings, and no one could help noticing them because they were so bright.”

“I suppose all the old fairy tales are more or less true. And you’re simply a wicked, cruel magician like the ones in the stories. Well, I’ve never read a story in which people of that sort weren’t paid out in the end, and I bet you will be.”

″‘Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.‘”

“Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group.”

“‘But please, please—won’t you—can’t you give me something that will cure Mother?’ Up till then he had been looking at the Lion’s great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself. ‘My son, my son,’ said Aslan. ‘I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.‘”

“He was not in the least frightened, or excited, or curious. If anyone had asked him ‘Where did you come from?’ he would probably have said, ‘I’ve always been here.’ That was what it felt like—as if one had always been in that place and never been bored, although nothing had ever happened.”

“It was too late. Exactly as he spoke, Polly’s hand went out to touch one of the rings. And immediately, without a flash or a noise or a warning of any sort, there was no Polly. Digory and his Uncle were alone in the room.”

“For the rest of that day, whenever he looked at the things about him, and saw how ordinary and unmagical they were, he hardly dared to hope; but when he remembered the face of Aslan he did hope.”

“But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.”

“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 a 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”

“Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.”

“I know someone will ask me, ‘Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil—hoofs and horns and all?’ Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns.”

“Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again.”

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.”

“We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.”

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.”

“I sometimes wonder if all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.”

“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”.

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”

“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different...”

“When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.”

“If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.”

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

“The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.”

“Forgiveness does not mean excusing.”

“Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”

“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.”

“This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

“You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.”

“Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar.”

“What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”

“The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred.”

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

“I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”

“In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s, we do not accept them easily enough.”

“Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

“Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”

“The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.”

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”

“Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”

“A children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.”

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.

Make full use of the fact that up to a certain point, fatigue makes women talk more and men talk less. Much secret resentment, even between lovers, can be raised from this.

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

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.

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

Suspicion often creates what it suspects.

When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.

Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.

There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours . . . The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels....

All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged.

If you can once get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point,’ you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all- and more amusing.

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden.

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for.

I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

For in grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

The death of a beloved is an amputation.

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.

It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

Knock and it shall be opened.′ But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.

What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?

I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate if they do, and if they don’t.