2,254 Quotes by C. S. Lewis

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

When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.

If crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime and compulsorily cured.

If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions – if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before – then I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary.

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.

God has infinite attention, infinite leisure to spare for each one of us. He doesn’t have to take us in the line. You’re as much alone with Him as if you were the only thing He’d ever created.

In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.

Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man’s functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.

The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don’t forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.