C. S. Lewis Doe Quotations

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.

Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest upon reciprocity.

What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.

I#pray because the need flows out of me all the time-walking and sleeping. It does not change #‎ God - it changes me.

Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' - or else not.

Prayer does not change God; it changes me.

Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.

I wonder if people who asked for God to intervene in our world, really know what they are asking. Will they want to be there when God really does intervene?

Forgiveness does not mean excusing.

No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly

[Something] does not rise to the dignity of error.

A work of (whatever) art can be either 'received' or 'used'. ...'Using' is inferior to 'reception' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it ... When the art in question is literature a complication arises, for to 'receive' significant words is always, in one sense, to 'use' them, to go through and beyond them to an imagined something which is not itself verbal.

The New Testament does not envisage solitary religion; regular assembly for worship is everywhere in the epistles.

I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself.

Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means.

The higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be.

The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden...A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved although it does tell us a good deal about those who hold it.

Of Course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is)... Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.

The value of the individual does not lie in him. He receives it by union with Christ.

But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.

There is someone I accept even though I do not approve of all he does...and that someone is me

The proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator—to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy.

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.

She remembered, as every sensible person does, that you should never never shut yourself up in a wardrobe.

There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.

The bolt of Tash falls from above!' 'Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway?