Quotes by Clive Staples Lewis
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
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.
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a "wandering to find home," why should we not look forward to the arrival?
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
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.
You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
It is hard to have patience with people who say "There is no death" or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
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.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
