Quotes by Clive Staples Lewis
The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
If we could know which of us, darling, would be the first to go, who would be first to breast the swelling tide and step alone upon the other side - if we could know!
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
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.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
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.
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.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
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.
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
We are what we believe we are.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
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.
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.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
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."
