C. S. Lewis Lit Quotations

Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived.

Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.

The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.

Aslan" said Lucy "you're bigger". "That is because you are older, little one" answered he. "Not because you are?" "I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger".

Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed.

And that is enough to raise your thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride… Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy.

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.

The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of curse it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.

It is because they have no Oyarsa,' said one of the pupils. It is because everyone of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,' said Augray.

We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility.

Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality of whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them.

What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all.

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.

A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility.

He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants everyone to use what sense they have.

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

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

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

Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.

We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect but how we should pray being as we now are ... It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women.

The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing than worshipping ... 'Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god.

Our problem with desire is that we want too little.

You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage but He is building a palace. He intends to come & live in it Himself

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

Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality.

Good and evil increase at compound interest. That's why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance.

Tea should be taken in solitude.

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

The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.

Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.

Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself. In reality, because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must, even more wholeheartedly than they, invoke the divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet. For consider how narrow its true path is. Is must not become what the people call a "mutual admiration society"; yet if it is not full of mutual admiration, of Appreciative love, it is not Friendship at all.

In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.

Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?

when pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.

That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means that you are very conceited indeed.

The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.

Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.

Our problem is not that we desire too much but too little.

Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us-to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is.

Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.

Literary Experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.. .Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Humility is self-forgetfulness.

Don't think of God in terms of forms, because forms are limited and God is unlimited.

It is often little things that are hardest to stand.

A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.

Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.

Time is the very lens through which ye see -- small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope -- something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality.

For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?

Homemaking is surely in reality the most important work in the world.

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.

There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline , and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.

God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.

He wondered how he could ever have thought of the planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.

We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good; if bad, because it works in us patience, humility, contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.

Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality.

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue.

Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.

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

Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.

A man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.

Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there'd be no difficulty.

I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.

Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you - the part that chooses - into something a little different than what it was before. Taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature.

As long as you are proud, you cannot know God.

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.

If the immutable heart can be grieved by the puppets of its own making, it is Divine Omnipotence, no other, that has subjected it, freely, and in a humility that passes understanding. If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God, but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.

You can give the Devil too much or too little attention.

To get even near humility, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.

In a sense it (Christianity) creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteousness and loving.

Catch {a man} at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, "By jove, I'm being humble," and almost immediately pride - pride at his own humility - will appear.

One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.

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.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality. . . asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

If anyone would like to acquire humility, the first step is to realize one is proud. Nothing can be done before it.

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.

What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.

Only real risk passes the reality of faith.

Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations.

That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves part of eternal reality.