Clive Staples Lewis was a British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer, and Christian apologist. He is best known for his fictional work, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics. His faith profoundly affected his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim. In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis was honoured with a memorial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Lewis’s works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies.
Affection Is Responsible For Nine-tenths Of Whatever Solid And Durable Happiness There Is In Our Lives.
Aim At Heaven And You Will Get Earth Thrown In. Aim At Earth And You Get Neither.
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.
Friendship Is Unnecessary, Like Philosophy, Like Art... It Has No Survival Value; Rather It Is One Of Those Things That Give Value To Survival.
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.'
You Can't Get A Cup Of Tea Big Enough Or A Book Long Enough To Suit Me.
Has This World Been So Kind To You That You Should Leave With Regret? There Are Better Things Ahead Than Any We Leave Behind.
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.
An Explanation Of Cause Is Not A Justification By Reason.
This Is One Of The Miracles Of Love: It Gives A Power Of Seeing Through Its Own Enchantments And Yet Not Being Disenchanted.
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.
Everyone Has Noticed How Hard It Is To Turn Our Thoughts To God When Everything Is Going Well With Us... While What We Call 'Our Own Life' Remains Agreeable, We Will Not Surrender It To Him. What, Then, Can God Do In Our Interests But Make 'Our Own Life' Less Agreeable To Us, And Take Away The Plausible Sources Of False Happiness?
Courage Is Not Simply One Of The Virtues, But The Form Of Every Virtue At The Testing Point.
Reason Is The Natural Order Of Truth; But Imagination Is The Organ Of Meaning.
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.
The Future Is Something Which Everyone Reaches At The Rate Of 60 Minutes An Hour, Whatever He Does, Whoever He Is.
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 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.
The Safest Road To Hell Is The Gradual One - The Gentle Slope, Soft Underfoot, Without Sudden Turnings, Without Milestones, Without Signposts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of All Tyrannies A Tyranny Sincerely Exercised For The Good Of Its Victims May Be The Most Oppressive.
Can A Mortal Ask Questions Which God Finds Unanswerable? Quite Easily, I Should Think. All Nonsense Questions Are Unanswerable.
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.
No One Ever Told Me That Grief Felt So Like Fear.
God Cannot Give Us A Happiness And Peace Apart From Himself, Because It Is Not There. There Is No Such Thing.
Miracles Do Not, In Fact, Break The Laws Of Nature.
Nothing That You Have Not Given Away Will Ever Be Really Yours.
There Is, Hidden Or Flaunted, A Sword Between The Sexes Till An Entire Marriage Reconciles Them.
Christianity, If False, Is Of No Importance, And If True, Of Infinite Importance. The Only Thing It Cannot Be Is Moderately Important.
We Are What We Believe We Are.
Real Joy Seems To Me Almost As Unlike Security Or Prosperity As It Is Unlike Agony.
'Good English' Is Whatever Educated People Talk; So That What Is Good In One Place Or Time Would Not Be So In Another.
Nothing Is More Dangerous To One's Own Faith Than The Work Of An Apologist. No Doctrine Of That Faith Seems To Me So Spectral, So Unreal As One That I Have Just Successfully Defended In A Public Debate.
When Christ Died, He Died For You Individually Just As Much As If You'd Been The Only Man In The World.
What I Call My 'Self' Now Is Hardly A Person At All. It's Mainly A Meeting Place For Various Natural Forces, Desires, And Fears, Etcetera, Some Of Which Come From My Ancestors, And Some From My Education, Some Perhaps From Devils. The Self You Were Really Intended To Be Is Something That Lives Not From Nature But From God.
I'm Tall, Fat, Rather Bald, Red-faced, Double-chinned, Black-haired, Have A Deep Voice, And Wear Glasses For Reading.
History Isn't Just The Story Of Bad People Doing Bad Things. It's Quite As Much A Story Of People Trying To Do Good Things. But Somehow, Something Goes Wrong.
Satan, The Leader Or Dictator Of Devils, Is The Opposite, Not Of God, But Of Michael.
We Are Not Living In A World Where All Roads Are Radii Of A Circle And Where All, If Followed Long Enough, Will Therefore Draw Gradually Nearer And Finally Meet At The Centre: Rather In A World Where Every Road, After A Few Miles, Forks Into Two, And Each Of Those Into Two Again, And At Each Fork, You Must Make A Decision.
Failures, Repeated Failures, Are Finger Posts On The Road To Achievement. One Fails Forward Toward Success.
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.
How Incessant And Great Are The Ills With Which A Prolonged Old Age Is Replete.
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.
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.
Eros Will Have Naked Bodies; Friendship Naked Personalities.
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.