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People Quotes by C. S. Lewis

86 People quotes by C. S. Lewis

All People quotes C. S. Lewis’s page

People are described as rebels who lay down their arms before God. Lewis says that love is a will, not just a feeling, and that religion must make us better, otherwise it can make us worse. He also points out that people who cheat at cards are less trustworthy than those who simply refuse to cheat.

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You people have no imagination!

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You can't really study people; you can only get to know them.

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The only people who hate escapism are jailers.

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Most people spend most of their lives doing neither what they want to be doing nor what they ought to be doing.

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Whenever a person dwells chiefly, or even frequently, on the faults of other people's religions, he is in a bad condition.

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Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again.

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We have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

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Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

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God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want…

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Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way.

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The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

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A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately…

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The only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. Our charities should pinch and hamper us. If we live…

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If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out…

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Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all…

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There is only one way fit for a man -- Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are…

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People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again…

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Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people…

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If religion does not make us better people, it will make us very much worse. And of all the bad men who…

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The Intelligentsia (scientists apart) are losing all touch with, and all influence over, nearly the whole human race. Our most esteemed poets…

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We may note in passing that He (Jesus) was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect…

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Vanity is really the least bad and most pardonable sort. The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration too much and is always…

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You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is…

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Our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from…

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If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete,…

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A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one.…

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A great deal of what is being published by writers in the religious tradition is a scandal and is actually turning people…

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I can answer that only by hearsay, returned the Guide, for pain is a secret which he has shared with your race…

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Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half…

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Temperance referred not abstaining, but going the right length and no further...of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian,…

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The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection.

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We do not come to God as bad people trying to become good people; we come as rebels to lay down our…

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People blush at praise--not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs.

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Many people think their prayers are never answered because it is the answered ones they forget.

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I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one.

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'Good English' is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in…

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I'd sooner live among people who don't cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards.

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I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

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The more pride we have, the more other people’s pride irritates us

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If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit.

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More by C. S. Lewis

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see…

Either Jesus is the Son of God ; or a madman or worse. But His being just a great teacher? He's not left that…

To every soul, God will look like its first love because He IS its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be…

Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified…

“Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As”

“When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man…

All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job...And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone…

If a man is going to write on chemistry, he learns chemistry. The same is true of Christianity.

The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection.

I#pray because the need flows out of me all the time-walking and sleeping. It does not change # God - it changes me.

Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become us us if they were?

Love is more than an emotion, it is a decision.

Ink is the great cure for all human ills.

A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders…

War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has…