Quotes By C. S. Lewis

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

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

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.

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

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.

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.

We are what we believe we are.

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

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

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.

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

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

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.

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.

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

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

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.

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.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

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.

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."

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

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.

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

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

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