13 C.S. Lewis Quotes (TT #7)

Thirteen C.S. Lewis Quotes

C.S. Lewis was an Athiest turned Christian theologian. He is best known for Allegorical stories called The Chronicles of Narnia, but he also wrote many deep, philosophical books. I highly recommend Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy.

1. "[God] is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him."

--The Problem of Pain

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

--Mere Christianity

3. "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

--Mere Christianity

4. "When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all."

--Mere Christianity

5. "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."

--The Silver Chair

6. "'When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.'"

--The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

7. "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

--Mere Christianity

8. "God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."

9. "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."

10. "Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."

11. "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."

12. "We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

--The Weight of Glory

13. "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless —it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."


--The Four Loves




You can find more C.S. Lewis quotes here:

http://www.comnett.net/~rex/cslewis.htm
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/c_s_lewis.html
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C.S._Lewis#The_Lion.2C_the_Witch.2C_and_the_Wardrobe

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