Quotes By C. S. Lewis

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.

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

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

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.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

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.

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

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.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

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.

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.

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

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.

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.

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

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

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.

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

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

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

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

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.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.