C.S. Lewis Quotes

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

"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."

"I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare."

"It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere."

"Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?"

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."

"A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you can't see something that's above you."

"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone."

"But that would be putting the clock back,"" gasped the Governor. ""Have you no idea of progress, of development?"" ""I have seen them both in an egg, "" said Caspian. ""We call it Going Bad in Narnia."

"To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?"

"The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day."

"Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal."

"The mark of Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all."

"You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better -- the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read."

"We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."

"When you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet."

"Adventures are never fun while you're having them."

"The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling."

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

"The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt."