C. S. Lewis Quotes About Animals

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  To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

  C. S. Lewis

  Love, Inspirational, Broken Heart

• Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.

  C. S. Lewis

  Heart, Animal, Broken

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.190, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Morning, Jobs

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.181, Simon and Schuster

• If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wisdom, Struggle, Cutting

• ...we sacrifice other species to our own not because our own has any objective metaphysical privilege over others, but simply because it is ours. It may be very natural to have this loyalty to our own species, but let us hear no more from the naturalists about the "sentimentality" of anti-vivisectionists. If loyalty to our own species - preference for man simply because we are men - is not sentiment, then what is?

  C. S. Lewis

  Loyalty, Sacrifice, Men

• Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

  C. S. Lewis

  Time, Animal, Eternal Love

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.150, Simon and Schuster

• One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.

  C. S. Lewis

  Life, Animal, Reality

• For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God has made the world- that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colors and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His head' as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.

  C. S. Lewis

  Fighting, Animal, Men

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “What Christians Believe”, p.11, Harper Collins

• The higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be.

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Men, Doe

  C.S. Lewis (1960). “Mere Christianity”

• I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse... Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil.

  C. S. Lewis

  Thinking, Animal, Men

• Wouldn't it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you'd never know which were which.

  C. S. Lewis

  Home, Animal, Men

• Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise or a sacrilegious abuse of an authority by divine right.

  C. S. Lewis

  Exercise, Animal, Men

• Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man's functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.

  C. S. Lewis

  Dog, Cat, Animal

• No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Animal, Men

• Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Emotion, Aids

  C. S. LEWIS (1947). “THE ABOLITION OF MAN”

• We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men - things at once rational and animal.

  C. S. Lewis

  Angel, Animal, Men

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “The Pilgrim's Regress: The Wade Annotated Edition”, p.215, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• My own eyes are not enough for me...I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many is not enough...I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee. More gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.

  C. S. Lewis

  Dog, Nature, Regret

• The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Rights, Names

• In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Choices, Pet

• The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Past, Guiding Principles

• At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget[...]that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.

  C. S. Lewis

  Prayer, Animal, Differences

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.147, Simon and Schuster

• Now sir, said the bulldog in his business-like way. 'Are you a animal, vegetable, or mineral?' - The Magician's Nephew

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Vegetables, Nephew

  C.S.Lewis (2016). “The Chronicles of Narnia Vol VI: The Magician's Nephew”, p.100, ENRICH CULTURE GROUP LIMITED

• Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.

  C. S. Lewis

  Kindness, Animal, People

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

• Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Lying, Animal

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