C.S. Lewis Quotes

And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to do another and harder and better one.

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"...

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought t...

This is a book about something

Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour ca...

But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try - Ransom has trie...

Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.

Feelings come and go, and when they come a good use can be made of them, but they cannot be our regular spiritual diet.

Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body and i...

The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning...

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.

Let's pray that the human race never escapes Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

It may be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies.

The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one e...

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.

Badness is only spoiled goodness.

The educated man, habitually, almost without noticing it, sees the present as something that grows out of a long perspective of centuries. In my the minds of my RAF hearers this perspective simply did...

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 fal...

It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.