C.S. Lewis

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.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

Don't say it was 'delightful'; make us say 'delightful' when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers 'Please, will you do the job for me?'

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.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn. My God do you learn.

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one!'

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

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.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

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.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation.

Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard.

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

You don't have a Soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

You play the hand you're dealt. I think the game's worthwhile.

The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.

Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

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.

If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.

Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.

No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power.

Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.

If the universe is so bad...how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?

If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally.

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.

We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.

God is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him.

Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere 'opiate of the people' have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor.

Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.

Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.

'You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,' said Aslan. 'And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.'

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?

It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere--'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...

When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.

You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.

Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.

The surest way of spoiling a pleasure is to start examining your satisfaction.

This moment contains all moments.

There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.

Other than heaven, the only place where one's heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell.

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

There will be two kinds of people in the end: Those that will say to God 'Thy will be done' and those to whom God will say 'Thy will be done.'

For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

We all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men 'after our own heart.' Only they really know our mind and only they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread. The little pockets of early Chrstians survived because they cared exclusively for the love of 'the bretheren' and stopped their ears to the opinion of the Pagan society around them. But a circle of criminals, cranks, or perverts survives in just the same way; by becoming deaf to the opinion of the outer world, by discounting it as the chatter of outsiders who 'don't understand,' of the 'conventional,' the 'bourgeois,' the 'Establishment,' of prigs, prudes, and humbugs.

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may 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.

The absent are easily refuted.

In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by the group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say.

Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.

Dualism is a truncated metaphysic.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you can't see something that's above you.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

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 is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

Regarding the debate about faith and works: It�s like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most important.

The more often a man feels without acting, the less he'll be able to act. And in the long run, the less he'll be able to feel.

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.

If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.

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.

Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.

Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.

Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it.

If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself.

Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one.

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.

Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly.

Many things--such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly--are done worst when we try hardest to do them.

If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents - the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's. But if their thoughts - i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy - are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true?

I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents.

It's like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.

If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of 'religion.'

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don't.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.