C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Quotes

• 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.