Almost all of these quotes are from Goodreads.com while some are paraphrased from memory or my own copy of Lewis’s various works.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

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 patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.

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

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.

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.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.

Money covers over a multitude of sins. – Lord Buckbeak

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.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even 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. To love is to be vulnerable

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

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”

I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew
that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The
explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

We are like a tin man being made into a real man. We cry out that God is ruining the tin when in fact he is replacing the tin with flesh and blood.

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

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.

A man has three choices about his finances. He may either increase his means, diminish his wants or both. Otherwise he must become a thief. – Lord Buckbeak

There are two ways of being happy: We may either diminish our wants or augment our means — either will do — the result in the same; and it is for each man to decide for himself, and do that which happens to be the easiest. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706–April 17, 1790)

“I have noticed that most people in this world are about as happy as they have made up their minds to be.” – quoted by Dr. Frank Crane and attributed to Abraham Lincoln in 1916

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

To larger sight, the edge of shadow is the rim of light. – Lord Buckbeak’s revision

To larger sight, the rim of shadow is the line of light. – Thomas William Parsons

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

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. 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 a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.

Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

Trying to come to an agreement with a person holding a different worldview is like two people arguing with each other from their front porches across the street. They cannot come to an agreement because they are standing on different premises. – Lord Buckbeak

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

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.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?

I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

Everyone in Hell is naked. Either be found clothed with the righteousness of Christ or be found naked .- Lord Buckbeak

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

“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 greatest emperor on earth. Be content.”

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. . .It is when I turn to Christ,
when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought I was the only one!”

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

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

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

Old age is not for sissies.

To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him,
it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as
a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

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 course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.

Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.

Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

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.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

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 should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

If we could know which of us, darling, would be the first to go, who would be first to breast the swelling tide and step alone upon the other side – if we could know!

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

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 irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.

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

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

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.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they “own” their bodies – those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

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

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.
C. S. Lewis

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

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

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

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.”

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.

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.

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.

The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.

I was with book, as a woman is with child.

Unfortunately, so far, all of my children have been stillborn. – Lord Buckbeak

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. 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 one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

The death of a beloved is an amputation.

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies–these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.

It was when I was happiest that I longed most…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.

The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.

Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it — made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

“Son,’he said,’ ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why…the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I’m afraid even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up they were so used to quarreling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.

A woman’s heart should be so close to God that a man should have to chase Him to find her.

Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!

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

I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. …I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.

But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.

No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.

It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.

Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.

You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.

God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can’t. If a thing is free to be good it’s also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they’ve got to be free.
Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. (…) If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.

My cmnt: Both my wife and I love C. S. Lewis. We have benefitted immensely from his writings on Christianity and the Narnia novels. Lewis freely admits that he is not a theologian and I appreciate that and I also know that it would not make him anymore authoritative if he was. But it also seems to me that he has purposefully decided to not comment on some very divisive Christian issues the Church struggled with for centuries and in some cases still does.

My cmnt: Free will is one of them. Of course Lewis is correct, God did not create automatons who cannot act upon their own volitions. That issue is about God’s free will, not ours. Nothing in all the history of the universe has happened outside of the sovereign will of its Creator, the triune God of the Bible. Neither a hair falls from our heads nor a sparrow from the sky without the direct providence of God will it.

My cmnt: God did not find anything “worth the risk” as Lewis puts it. God never has nor ever will “risk” anything. He works everything out according to his sovereign plan for the universe which involved revealing His entire being and nature to His children.