C.S. Lewis

29 quotes

• The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.

• The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.

• Joy is the serious business of heaven.

• The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.

• The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self all your wishes and precautions to Christ.

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

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

• To love at all is to be vulnerable.

• Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

• Jesus Christ did not say, Go into all the world and tell the world that it is quite right.

• The future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain, not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

• Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

• We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

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

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

• That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.

• Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world is always present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.

• What can you ever really know of other people’s souls, of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole of creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him.

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

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

• This is the fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion.

• The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.

• The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.

• There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. […] There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. […] The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.

• 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.

• Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you’re making.

• Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.

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