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? - C. S. Lewis
To love at all is to be vulnerable. - C. S. Lewis
Pride is a spiritual Cancer: It eats up the very possibilty of love, or contentment, or even common sense. - C. S. Lewis
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. - C. S. Lewis
A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered. - C. S. Lewis
Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes. - C. S. Lewis
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. - C. S. Lewis
No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear. - C. S. Lewis
A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional... values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process. - C. S. Lewis
Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. - C. S. Lewis
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. - C. S. Lewis
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' - C. S. Lewis
Badness is only spoiled goodness. - C. S. Lewis
Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good. - C. S. Lewis
When you reach the thing you were desiring, if it doesn't satisfy you, it was not what you were desiring. - C. S. Lewis
Whatever you do, He [God] will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him. - C. S. Lewis
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.... - C. S. 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. - C. S. Lewis
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one. - C. S. Lewis
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... it has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival. - C. S. Lewis
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. - C. S. Lewis
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. - C. S. Lewis
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. - C. S. Lewis
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives. - C. S. Lewis
I believe in God like I believe in the sun, not because I can see it, but because of it all things are seen. - C. S. Lewis
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. - C. S. Lewis
No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.' - C. S. Lewis
No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. - C. S. Lewis
The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. - C. S. Lewis
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. - C. S. Lewis
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. - C. S. Lewis
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. - C. S. Lewis
You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. - C. S. 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. - C. S. Lewis
It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one. - C. S. Lewis
Try to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean. That is the whole are and joy of words. - C. S. Lewis
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. - C. S. Lewis
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. - C. S. Lewis
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither. - C. S. Lewis
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities. - C. S. Lewis
Nothing is beautiful except the abnormal; and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm. - C. S. Lewis
If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, also we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for another world. - C. S. Lewis