C. S. Lewis Quotes

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

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

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.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

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

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.

History isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.

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

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

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

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

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

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

There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.