Christian author (1898-1963)
Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."
C. S. LEWIS
The Four Loves
Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.
C. S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters
We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may "conquer" them.
C. S. LEWIS
The Abolition of Man
Nothing is yet in its true form.
C. S. LEWIS
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold
I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
C. S. LEWIS
letter to Arthur Greeves, February 1932
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
C. S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters
He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.
C. S. LEWIS
The Space Trilogy
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
C. S. LEWIS
The Weight of Glory
The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.
C. S. LEWIS
A Mind Awake
Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
You must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.
C. S. LEWIS
The Pilgrim's Regress
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
C. S. LEWIS
The Weight of Glory
God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
Length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery.
C. S. LEWIS
The Magician's Nephew
Some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what he had not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies.
C. S. LEWIS
God in the Dock
Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for "down here" is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment's rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
C. S. LEWIS
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
C. S. LEWIS
Mere Christianity
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
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.
C. S. LEWIS
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer