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Quotes by C. S. Lewis

English essayist & juvenile novelist (1898 - 1963)

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?

The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

Badness is only spoiled goodness.

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

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

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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....