God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
- C. S. Lewis
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
- C. S. Lewis
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
- C. S. Lewis
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
- C. S. Lewis
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
- C. S. Lewis
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
- C. S. Lewis
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- C. S. Lewis
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
- C. S. Lewis
You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
- C. S. Lewis
You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
- C. S. Lewis
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
- C. S. Lewis
Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- C. S. Lewis
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
- C. S. Lewis
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
- C. S. Lewis
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
- C. S. Lewis
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
- C. S. Lewis
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
- C. S. Lewis
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
- C. S. Lewis
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- 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.
- C. S. Lewis
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
- C. S. Lewis
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- C. S. Lewis
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
- C. S. Lewis
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
- C. S. Lewis
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- C. S. Lewis
The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- C. S. Lewis
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- C. S. Lewis
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
- C. S. Lewis
I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
- C. S. Lewis
It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
- C. S. Lewis
Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- C. S. Lewis
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- C. S. Lewis
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- C. S. Lewis
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
- C. S. Lewis
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.
- C. S. Lewis
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
- C. S. Lewis
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
- C. S. Lewis
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
- C. S. Lewis
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
- C. S. Lewis
