C. S. Lewis Quotes About Children

• It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

  C. S. Lewis

  Strong, Sex, Children

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Weight of Glory”, p.26, Harper Collins

• 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

• When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

  C. S. Lewis

  Fear, Children, Growing Up

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature”, p.56, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, School, Adults

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.246, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• God wants a child's heart and a grownup's head.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Heart, Want

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

• To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death -- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wisdom, Children, Men

• When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Doors, Special

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.33, Faber & Faber

• But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Paws

  C. S. Lewis (1995). “The last battle”

• I'm not sure God wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Thinking, Suffering

• The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Teaching, Taken

  C. S. Lewis (1987). “Present Concerns”, p.73, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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

• Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Kind, Silliness

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “The Chronicles of Narnia Complete 7-Book Collection with Bonus Book: Boxen”, p.50, Harper Collins

• Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.... The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.

  C. S. Lewis

  Teacher, Horse, Jobs

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.77, HarperCollins UK

• Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Destiny, Knights

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories”, p.43, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• You asked for a loving God: you have one... The consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes.

  C. S. Lewis

  Dog, Sex, Children

• Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Children, Mean

  "Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold". Book by C. S. Lewis, 1956.

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

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Humor, Ifs

• Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become a child again, even now... You have gone wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Water, Gone

• Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. . . youth's characteristic chronological snobbery.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Humorous, Parenting

  C. S. Lewis (1992). “An Experiment in Criticism”, p.73, Cambridge University Press

• Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Stories, Lions

  C.S.Lewis (2016). “The Chronicles of Narnia Vol V: The Horse and his Boy”, p.150, ENRICH CULTURE GROUP LIMITED

• 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

• I was with book, as a woman is with child.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Book, Writing

• I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her. And I knew who wept, and what had been done to her, and who had done it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Girl, Children, Hate

• Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mother, Wisdom, Children

• Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, World, Stupidest

  C.S.Lewis (2016). “The Chronicles of Narnia Vol IV: The Silver Chair”, p.173, ENRICH CULTURE GROUP LIMITED

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