Quotes By C. S. Lewis

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

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.

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.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

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.

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

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.

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

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

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

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

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.

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

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

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

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

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

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

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.

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.