C. S. Lewis Would Be Quotations

Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends - comrades - do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed...

Kids like us don't often have the chance of meeting a great warrior like you. Would you have a little fencing match with me? It would be frightfully decent.

Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

I may repeat 'Do as you would be done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God;and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey him.

It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been "had for a sucker" by any number of imposters but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need.

The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question "Do you see the same truth?" would be "I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend," no Friendship can arise - though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.

If God 'foresaw' our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose god is outside and above the Time-line... You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He know your tomorrow's actions in just the same way--because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but the moment at which you have done it is already 'NOW' for Him.

The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.

It would be impossible to accept naturalism itself if we really and consistently believed naturalism. For naturalism is a system of thought. But for naturalism all thoughts are mere events with irrational causes. It is, to me at any rate, impossible to regard the thoughts which make up naturalism in that way and, at the same time, regard them as a real insight into external reality...If it is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat.

We can conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of abuse of free will by His creatures: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when used as a weapon... But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and therefore, freedom of the will would be void.

The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right.

What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life, matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations.

The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.

I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given.

The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle.

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult to save.

The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!