Quotes

“An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.” Clive Staples Lewis

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.” Clive Staples Lewis

“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.” Clive Staples Lewis

“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” Clive Staples Lewis

“Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.” Clive Staples Lewis

“Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.” Clive Staples Lewis

“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.” Clive Staples Lewis

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.” Clive Staples Lewis

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

“You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.” Clive Staples Lewis

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” Clive Staples Lewis

“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.” Clive Staples Lewis

“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.” Clive Staples Lewis

“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.” Clive Staples Lewis

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.” Clive Staples Lewis

“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.” Clive Staples Lewis

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Clive Staples Lewis

“The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.” Clive Staples Lewis

“Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.” Clive Staples Lewis

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” Clive Staples Lewis

“A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.” Clive Staples Lewis

“Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.” Clive Staples Lewis

“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.” Clive Staples Lewis

“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.'” Clive Staples Lewis

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” Clive Staples Lewis

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.” Clive Staples Lewis

“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.” Clive Staples Lewis

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.” Clive Staples Lewis

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” Clive Staples Lewis

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” Clive Staples Lewis