Get ready to be inspired by some of C.S. Lewis’ most thought-provoking quotes. As one of the most influential authors of all time, Lewis’ wisdom transcends time and is sure to resonate with you on a deep, personal level. These powerful C.S. Lewis quotes will ignite your soul and lift your heart.
Best C.S. Lewis Quotes for Your Daily Dose of Wisdom
True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.
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.
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
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.
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
Joy is the serious business of heaven.
We are what we believe we are.
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.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
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 how often it has been told before you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
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.
Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.
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.
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
Grown ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
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.
Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.
There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only and that is to support the ultimate career.
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.
The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.
I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
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.
I sometimes wonder if all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia.
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
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.
A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.
She is a perfectly terrible person, said Lucy. She calls herself the Queen of Narnia though 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.
It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
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.
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
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.
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.
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.
If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.
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.
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
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.
We are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.
All get what they want; they do not always like it.
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.
Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.
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 judgment. 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.
The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.
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.
Forgiveness does not mean excuse.
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.
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 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.
What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.
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.
It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.
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.
There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
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.
The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
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.
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.
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.
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silent hurt more.
Miraz weeded them out. Belisar and Uvulas were shot with arrows on a hunting party by chance, it was presumed. All the great house of the Passarids he sent to fight giants on the northern frontier till one by one they fell.
