Quotes by 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.
We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers "Please will you do the job for me."
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.
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!"
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike.
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
Pride is a spiritual Cancer: It eats up the very possibilty of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.
...we sacrifice other species to our own not because our own has any objective metaphysical privilege over others, but simply because it is ours. It may be very natural to have this loyalty to our own species, but let us hear no more from the naturalists about the "sentimentality" of anti-vivisectionists. If loyalty to our own species--preference for man simply because we are men--is not sentiment, then what is?
