Quotes by C.S. Lewis

“I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the horses the new strength of fear for the last mill so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.”

“The death of a beloved is an amputation.”

“The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.”

“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 wel say that birth doesn’t matter.”

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved persons ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

“If you love deeply, youre going to get hurt badly. But its still worth it.”

“The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go Gods love for us does not.”

“Im on Aslans side even if there isnt any Aslan to lead it. Im going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isnt any Narnia.”

“I wish I had never been born, she said. What are we born for? For infinite happiness, said the Spirit. You can step out into it at any moment...”

“Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.”

“The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already... begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result… The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.”

“Do you think I care if Aslan dooms me to death?” said the King. “That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.”

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.”

“Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.”

“Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see. ”

“They say, The coward dies many times; so does the beloved. Didnt the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?”

“Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?”

“How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, I am at peace with God. She smiled, but not at me. Poi si torno all eterna fontana.”

“If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.”

“As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.”