C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Quotes

• 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.