C. S. Lewis

Quotes

To love at all is to be vulnerable.
I believe in God like I believe in the sun, not because I can see it, but because of it all things are seen.
A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional... values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.
This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'
Pride is a spiritual Cancer: It eats up the very possibilty of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.
When you reach the thing you were desiring, if it doesn't satisfy you, it was not what you were desiring.
The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... it has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival.
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.
I have found a desire within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
It is hard to have patience with people who say "There is no death" or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
It is no good asking for a simple religion. Real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I'm sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of - all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to my optic nerve and what it does to my brain - and, of course, you'll find that what we call 'seeing a table' lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of. A child saying a child's prayer looks simple. And if you are content to stop there, well and good. But if you are not - and the modern world usually is not - if you want to go on and ask what is really happening - then you must be prepared for something difficult. If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is silly then to complain that the something is not more simple.
Nothing is beautiful except the abnormal; and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm.
If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, also we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for another world.
Whatever you do, He [God] will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues , but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
Try to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean. That is the whole are and joy of words.
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey "people." People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest....
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.
No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
...that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike.
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'
Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.