One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.
There's an abundance of book quotes online; however, this passage might sound pretty familiar to you. And if it does, your brain is not playing mind games on you. This famous quote from one of the Narnia books may hit close to home because it takes you back to when you discovered the series and the magical realm of Narnia. Back in a time when fairytales didn't feel so unrealistic or childish, and the idea that you might "discover" a new universe in the back of your closet didn't seem so ridiculous. Oh, what a lovely experience it must've been to read The Chronicles of Narnia books for the first time.
Whether a fan of the novel series or the media franchise, you must know who brought this fantasy world of magic, mythical beasts, and talking animals to light. Clive Staples Lewis, the British writer and theologian must be no stranger to you then. Throughout his life, C.S. Lewis wrote more than 30 books. Although not explicitly a children's book author, he's best known for The Chronicles of Narnia, now considered a classic of children's literature and some of the best children's books.
However, the numerous books are not all the writer has left behind. C.S. Lewis left hundreds of inspiring quotes and quotes from books that keep the memory of this incredible author alive to this day. And whether you're familiar with the author and his stories or not, many of these famous quotes by C.S. Lewis will strike you as wise and moving.
Below, we have compiled a selection of the best C.S. Lewis quotes about friendship, love, faith, suffering, literature, and Christianity. But don't get discouraged if you are not a Christian or religious; either way, you will find an inspiring quote that will fit your beliefs and values. Is there a quote from the Narnia books that you particularly like? Let us know!
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“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
Or Medically sick enough to believe again. And enjoy the little things.
“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.’”
“Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.”
“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.”
“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different…”
“Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.”
I cant hold a grudge to save my life. I think its a good trait for the most part, but i have trouble when i forgive people i shoudnt.
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
“The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not.”
“It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.”
“Forgiveness does not mean excusing.”
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to him and bad when it turns from him.”
“Friendship… Is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself...”
Can confirm. I met my best friend by shouting that we were wearing the same shirt from across the cafeteria. ( it was a Slytherin shirt)
“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.”
“Things never happen the same way twice.”
I love that at the time I'm reading this, it is on this list twice.
“Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”
“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.”
“Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.”
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
“You can make anything by writing.”
“Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, at the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more, when he bares his teeth, winter meets its death, and when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.”
“A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.”
Like remembering that one cozy spot from your childhood that was warm and comfortable
“Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”
I just cry when i feel emotions, mad, sad, happy, numb. All the emotions, like a smoothie.
“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”
“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.”
“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life."
“The death of a beloved is an amputation.”
from the heart where it leaves a gaping wound that festers until move on and get help.
“Jesus Christ did not say, ‘Go into all the world and tell the world that it is quite right.’”
“The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
“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.”
“Make your choice, adventurous stranger, strike the bell and bide the danger, or wonder, till it drives you mad, what would have followed if you had.”
“Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
“When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.”
“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.”
“There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.”
“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.”
“This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”
“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”
“He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.”
“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.”
“It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.”
“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words.”
“I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.”
“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”
“Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.”
“It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumbling's or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision – it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.”
“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”
“The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self — all your wishes and precautions — to Christ.”
“It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”
“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”
“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.”
“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
“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.”
“‘Child,’ said the Lion, ‘I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.’”
“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.”
“Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?”
“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.”
“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.”
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”
“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…”
This is why im spiritual, i believe there is a higher power. But it's not the gods of stories. It simply exists and is there.
“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 two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
“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.”
“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
“God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.”
“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.”
“‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,’ said Aslan. ‘And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.’”
“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.”
“Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can’t see it. So quietly submit to be painted—i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone. You are in the right way. Walk—don’t keep on looking at it.”
“God will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist’s shop.”
“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.”
“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird 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.”
“In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together; each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others.”
“‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.”
