Quotes By C. S. Lewis

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

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.

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.

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.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.