C. S. Lewis Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.'"

"Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

"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."

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

"Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"We are what we believe we are."

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

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

"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."

"When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you'd been the only man in the world."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"I gave in, and admitted that God was God."

"Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities."

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