Quotes from C. S. Lewis

We may think God wants actions of a certain kind, but God wants people of a certain kind.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.

Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.

Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.

This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life's short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily

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

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.

We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.

One is given strength to bear what happens to one, but not the 100 and 1 different things that might happen.

If God had granted all the silly prayers I've made in my life, where should I be now?

I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one.

[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.

It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself-to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed.

Something deep in the human heart breaks at the thought of a life of mediocrity.

In a civilization like ours, I feel that everyone has to come to terms with the claims of Jesus Christ upon his life, or else be guilty of inattention or of evading the question.

Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.

All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness.

Well!' said Puddleglum, rubbing his hands. 'This is just what I needed. If these chaps don't teach me to take a serious view of life, I don't know what will.

I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us... While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.