C. S. Lewis Ad Quotations

But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn’t yet, or used to be Human once and isn’t now, or ought to be Human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.

We who have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous of our being which we owe to authors.

...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory

One always feel better when one has made up one's mind.

Read and Re-Read--"Re-reading, we always find a new book.

If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.

you had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words.

Here at last is the thing I was made for.

When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason. Ho, my beauties!

But what manner of use would it be ploughing through that darkness?' asked Drinian. Use?' replied Reepicheep. 'Use, Captain?' If you mean by filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventures. And here is as great an adventure as I have ever heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours.

We must meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their equals...The child as reader is neither to be patronized nor idolized: we talk to him as man to man.

I'm a beast, I am, and a Badger what's more. We don't change. We hold on.

Cobbles and kettledrums! ...I hope this madness isn't going to end in a moonlit climb and broken necks.

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. And don't talk too much about it even among yourselves. And don't mention it to anyone else unless you find that they've had adventures of the same sort themselves. What's that? How will you know? Oh, you'll know all right. Odd things, they say-even their looks-will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open. Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools." -The Profesor

My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue.

The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.

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.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

Make your choice, adventurous Stranger, Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had.

Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading

Your place in Heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.

If Christianity is only one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance.

We were made not primarily that we may love God, but that God may love us.

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

In our adversity, God shouts to us.

The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.

And so for a time it looked as if all the adventures were coming to and end; but that was not to be.

Adventures are never fun while you're having them.

It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

I was not born to be free---I was born to adore and obey.

If our deepest desires cannot be satisfied in this world, then we must have been made for another world.

Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier could give some advice.

Thirst was made for water. Inquiry for truth.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters...

In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

We shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.

I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside of their special subject.

Friends are seldom found; they are made.

It is a dreadful truth that the state of having to depend solely on God is what we all dread most.... It is good of Him to force us; but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time.

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)

Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things.

If you find that the reader of popular romances--however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances--goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.

The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.

As a Christian I take it for granted that human history will some day end; and I am offering Omniscience no advice as to the best date for that consummation.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century [...] lies where we have never suspected it [...] The only palliative is [...] by reading old books. [...] the books of the future would be just as good [...], but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.

As long as you notice, and have to count the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not conciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.

Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.

Some journeys take us far from home. Some adventures lead us to our destiny.

It is important early in life to acquire the power of reading sense wherever you happen to be.

All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.

If nothing in this world satisfies me, perhaps it is because I was made for another world.

The Christian "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection

We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism--the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good.

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.

Morality or duty never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.

It's always winter but it's never Christmas.

When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing.

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.

In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere — "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

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.

Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

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

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.

We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.

I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless he sees that it is good for him to wait.

We read to know we are not alone.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

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.

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

The humblest praise most, while cranks & malcontents praise least. Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible

Precisely because we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments.

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.

Many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and... God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.