Quotes by Clive Staples Lewis
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.
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
I have found a desire within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.
I believe in God like I believe in the sun, not because I can see it, but because of it all things are seen.
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
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.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... it has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival.
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.
I believe Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.
Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
She's the sort of woman who lives for others -- you can tell the others by their hunted expression.
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 capitalist for the same reasons.
