C. S. Lewis Quotes
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
We do not retreat from reality, we rediscover it.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.
We read to know that we are not alone.
Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.
Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
Every poem can be considered in two ways - as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
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.
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one.
Crying is all right in its own way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start to go right they often go on getting better and better.
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.
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.
Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.
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.
