C. S. Lewis Quotes

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.

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

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

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 grief felt so much like fear.

No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.

To love at all is to be vulnerable.

Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

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 pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.

I have found a desire within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

I believe in God like I believe in the sun, not because I can see it, but because of it all things are seen.

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.

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

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.