Quote

It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.

C. S. Lewis

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

C. S. Lewis
Age: 64 †
Born: 1898
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Broadcaster
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Belfast
Ireland
Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
Way
Shoot
Range
Evasive
Wild
Swat
Miss
Wasp
Track
Wasps
Missing
Elephant
Close
Troublesome
Ways
Elephants

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

Image
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C. S. Lewis
Image
He cannot tempt to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next.
C. S. Lewis
Image
The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.
C. S. Lewis
Image
...this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Things never happen the same way twice.
C. S. Lewis
Image
We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.
C. S. Lewis
Image
What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?
C. S. Lewis
Image
The bolt of Tash falls from above!' 'Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway?
C. S. Lewis
Image
I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.... I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Why should your heart not dance?
C. S. Lewis
Image
The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Thirst was made for water inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Everyone who believes in God at all believes that he knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Puddleglum's my name. But it doesn't matter if you forget it. I can always tell you again.
C. S. Lewis
Image
Edmund, who was becoming a nastier person every minute, thought that he had scored a great success, and went on at once to say, 'There she goes again. What's the matter with her?
C. S. Lewis
Image
Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of lucifer.... An instrument strung, but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician
C. S. Lewis
Image
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means that you are very conceited indeed.
C. S. Lewis