C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Quotes

• Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

• We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

• What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard.

• You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

• You don't have a Soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

• You play the hand you're dealt. I think the game's worthwhile.

• The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.

• Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

• 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 think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.

• Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

• The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

• A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional...values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.

• If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.

• Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.

• No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power.

• Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.

• If the universe is so bad...how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?

• If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally.

• Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.