Famous Quotes

Quotes by C S Lewis

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
• God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
• How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
• Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
• 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.
• I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
• Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
• Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
• No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
• Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
• Reason is the natural order of truth but imagination is the organ of meaning.
• Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
• 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.
• The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
• There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'
• There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
• 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.
• This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
• What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.