C. S. Lewis Long Quotations

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

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

Beloved," said the Glorious One, "unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.

Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours.

And in truth (as I now see) I had the wish to put off my journey as long as I could. Not for any peril or labour it might cost; but because I could see nothing in the whole world for me to do once it was accomplished. AS long as this act lay before me, there was, as it were, some barrier between me and the dead desert which the rest of my life must be.

They were pretty tired by now of course; but not what I’d call bitterly tired – only slow and feeling very dreamy and tired as one does when one is coming to the end of a long day in the open.

The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.

Who are you?' One who has waited long for you to speak.

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.

They stormed and jeered at one another in long meaningless words of about twenty syllables each.

Am I to understand,' said Reepicheep to Lucy after a long stare at Eustace, 'That this singularly discourteous person is under your Majesty's protection? Because, if not--

A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women.

The promise, made when I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love.

As long as he doesn't convert it into action, it does not matter how much a man thinks about his repentance.

Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

Emeth speaking of Aslan, "Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek...And since then, O Kings and Ladies, I have been wandering to find him and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that he called me Beloved, me who am but as a dog

We want not so much a Father but a grandfather in heaven, a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?

You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

We shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest "well pleased".

All the time the joke is that the word "mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either [Satan] or God will say "mine" of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.

Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head, but don't be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud, one is safe from the worst form of pride.

Laziness means more work in the long run.

As for wrinkles--Pshaw! Why shouldn't we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.

I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.

We have not long to live in any event. Let us spend what is left in seeking the unpeopled world behind the sunrise.

We long for more and God's promise is that there is more awaiting us. More to delight us than we will ever exhaust.

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one.

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment 'as to the Lord.' It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.

A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food.

Total war is the most humane in the long run.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii if a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision.

What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition.

As long as you are proud, you cannot know God.

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.