1. If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

- C.S. Lewis

2. 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.

- C.S. Lewis

3. Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.

- C.S. Lewis

4. Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.

- C.S. Lewis

5. It is not your business to succeed, but to do right; when you have done so, the rest lies with God.

- C.S. Lewis

6. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

- C.S. Lewis

7. Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

- C.S. Lewis

8. The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be.

- C.S. Lewis

9. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

- C.S. Lewis

10. I was with book, as a woman is with child.

- C.S. Lewis

11. God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

- C.S. Lewis

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

- C.S. Lewis

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

- C.S. Lewis

14. There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.

- C.S. Lewis

15. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.

- C.S. Lewis

16. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

- C.S. Lewis

17. 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.

- C.S. Lewis

18. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.

- C.S. Lewis

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

- C.S. Lewis

20. Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different…

- C.S. Lewis

21. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

- C.S. Lewis

22. There would be no sense in saying you trusted Jesus if you would not take his advice.

- C.S. Lewis

23. The death of a beloved is an amputation.

- C.S. Lewis

24. If you’re thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you’re embarking on something, which will take the whole of you.

- C.S. Lewis

25. Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

- C.S. Lewis

26. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

- C.S. Lewis

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

- C.S. Lewis

28. Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…

- C.S. Lewis

29. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

- C.S. Lewis

30. The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.

- C.S. Lewis

31. Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

- C.S. Lewis

32. There are 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.

- C.S. Lewis

33. Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

- C.S. Lewis

34. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

- C.S. Lewis

35. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

- C.S. Lewis

36. ?Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.

- C.S. Lewis

37. God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. You are as much alone with him as if you were the only being he had ever created.

- C.S. Lewis

38. It cost God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost him crucifixion.

- C.S. Lewis

39. Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.

- C.S. Lewis

40. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

- C.S. Lewis

41. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.

- C.S. Lewis

42. We do not want merely to see beauty… We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

- C.S. Lewis

43. I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!

- C.S. Lewis

44. Suspicion often creates what it suspects.

- C.S. Lewis

45. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?

- C.S. Lewis

46. Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar.

- C.S. Lewis

47. History isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.

- C.S. Lewis

48. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

- C.S. Lewis

49. Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

- C.S. Lewis

50. Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear.

- C.S. Lewis

51. Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

- C.S. Lewis

52. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

- C.S. Lewis

53. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

- C.S. Lewis

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

- C.S. Lewis

55. A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.

- C.S. Lewis

56. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

- C.S. Lewis

57. Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

- C.S. Lewis

58. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

- C.S. Lewis

59. In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s, we do not accept them easily enough.

- C.S. Lewis

60. The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.

- C.S. Lewis

61. You must ask for God’s help. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.

- C.S. Lewis

62. To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere.

- C.S. Lewis

63. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

- C.S. Lewis

64. When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you’d been the only man in the world.

- C.S. Lewis

65. Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.

- C.S. Lewis

66. We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

- C.S. Lewis

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

- C.S. Lewis

68. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

- C.S. Lewis

69. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.

- C.S. Lewis

70. 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.

- C.S. Lewis

71. In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.

- C.S. Lewis

72. God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

- C.S. Lewis

73. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

- C.S. Lewis

74. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you do, and you will presently come to love him.

- C.S. Lewis

75. Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

- C.S. Lewis

76. Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

- C.S. Lewis

77. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

- C.S. Lewis

78. But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.

- C.S. Lewis

79. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

- C.S. Lewis

80. A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.

- C.S. Lewis

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

- C.S. Lewis

82. The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

- C.S. Lewis

83. I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

- C.S. Lewis

84. No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

- C.S. Lewis

85. We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with him. He walks everywhere incognito.

- C.S. Lewis

86. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

- C.S. Lewis

87. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.

- C.S. Lewis

88. You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.

- C.S. Lewis

89. The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

- C.S. Lewis

90. Courage, dear heart.

- C.S. Lewis

91. All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.

- C.S. Lewis

92. A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.

- C.S. Lewis

93. God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.

- C.S. Lewis

94. Of all the bad men, religious bad men are the worst.

- C.S. Lewis

95. When you are arguing against God you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.

- C.S. Lewis

96. 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.

- C.S. Lewis

97. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

- C.S. Lewis

98. It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.

- C.S. Lewis

99. 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.

- C.S. Lewis

100. Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.

- C.S. Lewis

101. Being in love” first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.

- C.S. Lewis

102. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

- C.S. Lewis

103. 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.

- C.S. Lewis

104. Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.

- C.S. Lewis

105. Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

- C.S. Lewis

106. We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies, but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.

- C.S. Lewis

107. How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

- C.S. Lewis

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

- C.S. Lewis

109. We are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.

- C.S. Lewis

110. Do not dare not to dare.

- C.S. Lewis

111. We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

- C.S. Lewis

112. This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

- C.S. Lewis

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

- C.S. Lewis

114. I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

- C.S. Lewis

115. 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

116. She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.

- C.S. Lewis

117. Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

- C.S. Lewis

118. You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

- C.S. Lewis

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

- C.S. Lewis

120. You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.

- C.S. Lewis

121. 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.

- C.S. Lewis

122. I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

- C.S. Lewis

123. There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

- C.S. Lewis

124. It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

- C.S. Lewis

125. What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.

- C.S. Lewis

126. If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.

- C.S. Lewis

127. Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.

- C.S. Lewis

128. Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

- C.S. Lewis

129. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.

- C.S. Lewis

130. Good English’ is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.

- C.S. Lewis

131. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen – not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

- C.S. Lewis

132. With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

- C.S. Lewis

133. For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.

- C.S. Lewis

134. Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.

- C.S. Lewis

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

- C.S. Lewis

136. Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don’t go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don’t try to get there at all. It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it.

- C.S. Lewis

137. I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

- C.S. Lewis

138. The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

- C.S. Lewis

139. It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

- C.S. Lewis

140. 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.

- C.S. Lewis

141. The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.

- C.S. Lewis