C. S. Lewis Quotes About Books

• I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Reading, Men

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949”, p.77, HarperCollins UK

• It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Book, Reading

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.103, Simon and Schuster

• A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Children, Powerful

• What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects--with their Christianity latent.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Book, Want

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.91, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
• 

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

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Reading, Long

  "On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature".

• Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Book, Writing

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.74, HarperCollins UK

• Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Years, Good Book

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis”, p.117, Harper Collins

• I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.

  C. S. Lewis

  Goodbye, Book, Night

• The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.

  C. S. Lewis

  Plato, Book, Greatness

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.217, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Reading, Age

• The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

  C. S. Lewis

  Country, Memories, Flower

• I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Writing, Made

• I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.

  C. S. Lewis

  Girl, Book, Reading

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “The Chronicles of Narnia Complete 7-Book Collection with Bonus Book: Boxen”, p.106, Harper Collins

• Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Book, Taken

• Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Book, Reading

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature”, p.58, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Read and Re-Read--"Re-reading, we always find a new book.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Reading, New Books

• Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

  C. S. Lewis

  Respect, Book, Healing

• What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Next Week, Afternoon

• If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Writing, Kind

• 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.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Wind, Long

  C. S. Lewis (1966). “Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life”, p.20, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Play, Skills

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.98, HarperCollins UK

• I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic...In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. 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

  Father, Book, Men

• The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Reading, Sea Breeze

• We must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear, but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame, or struck dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations.

  C. S. Lewis

  Beautiful, Bible, Book

• He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Book, School

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: The Chronicles of Narnia”, p.2, Harper Collins

You May Also Like:

J. R. R. Tolkien

Joy Davidman

Lewis Carroll

Gilbert K. Chesterton

J. K. Rowling

Douglas Gresham

Georgie Henley