C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Quotes

• Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

• We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

• Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.

• Surely what a man does when he is caught off his guard is the best evidence as to what sort of man he is.

• I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

• Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased.

• Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease?

• When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right.

• You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the univerise in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.

• Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

• The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

• 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.

• Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?

• It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations.

• 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.

• A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

• A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

• Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

• Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth thrown in. Aim at Earth and you get neither.