C.S. Lewis Quotes

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

I don't want to hold you hand!

Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection - if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.

Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. 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.

The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden-that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.

Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

Friends are seldom found; they are made.

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way (there is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.

this is a book about something

The promise, made when I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love.

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.

Very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.

In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people's, we do not accept them easily enough.

Humans are very seldom either totally sincere or totally hypocritical. Their moods change, their motives are mixed, and they are often quite mistaken as to what their motives are.

The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.

Everything is as good or bad as our opinion makes it.

[the difference between the old and the new education being] in a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

See the bear in his own den before you judge of his conditions.

If I had really cared as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came- I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me, now it matters and I find I didn't.

The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

Most people don't need to be taught, they need only to be reminded

It certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue.

Anger is the fluid love bleeds when cut.

100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.

A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.

I came alive when I started loving you.

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.

Fancy sleeping on air. I wonder if anyone's done it before. I don't suppose they have. Oh, bother—-Scrubb probably has!

Puddleglum's my name. But it doesn't matter if you forget it. I can always tell you again.

What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week.

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.

One flesh. Or if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends.

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.

Autumn is really the best of the seasons

The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.

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.

Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress.

Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.

I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow - getting into my morning bath is usually one of them - that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.

I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.

I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.

Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.

Edmund, give a special goodbye to Trumpkin for me. He's been a brick.

Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.

Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung.

Selfishness has never been admired.

Every day in a life fills the whole life with expectations and memory.