By the way I also would say “I got a book.” But your teacher and I are not “English teachers” in the same sense. She has to put across an idea of what the English...

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we...

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are...

I seemed to hear God saying, “Put down your gun and we’ll talk.

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...

Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib...

We do not want merely to see beauty… we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into...

Revolutions often perpetuate the old evil under a new name.

In the only sense that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth time as the first. It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us. It is even better the second...

Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign...

I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. It is laid...

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” C.S. Lewis

The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose, and that is to support the ultimate career.

Some readers cannot enjoy the shepherds because they know (or they say they know) that real country people are not more happy or more virtuous than any one else; but it would be tedious here...

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.

To generalize is to be an idiot,” said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage.

Suddenly the lights of the Universe seemed to be turned down. As if some demon had rubbed the heaven’s face with a dirty sponge, the splendour in which they had lived for so long blenched...

But as long as you know you’re nobody special, you’ll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another.

. . . the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, praised most, while the crank, misfits and malcontents praised least.

You see, I don’t think age matters so much as people think. Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts were already 50 when I was 12….

There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation: what Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell. They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down...

I never noticed that the very strength and facility of the pessimists’ case at once poses us a problem. If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human...

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

The ease with which we can now get an audience for a discussion of religion does not prove that more people are becoming religious. What it really proves is the existence of a large “floating...

Marry, Sirs, if Merlin who was the Devil’s son was a true King’s man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the sons of bitches, must be rebels and...

For us this is the end of all the stories…. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world…had only been the cover and the title...

One of see. S. Louis’s endeavors as a teacher was to persuade young people that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring then second-hand knowledge, but it is usually much easier and more delightful...

You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan. “And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the...

Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

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...

I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

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

The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one!

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look....

good time”; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so...

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.

Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body–different from one another and each contributing what no other could. When you...

Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.

We’re free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you’re running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn’t your horse any longer. One might just as well...

To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.

I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own...

If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven; if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.

I believe that I am mad,” said Vertue presently. “The world cannot be as it seems to be. If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it:...

Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about.

The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first – wanting to be the centre – wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan:...

All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no...