C.S. Lewis Quotes

“You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.”

“Man must endure his going hence.”

“Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other.”

“True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.”

“When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?”

“Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.”

“A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion.”

“Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.”

“The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths--but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.”

“If crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call 'disease' can be treated as a crime and compulsorily cured.”

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”

“He who has not forgiven an enemy has never yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.”

“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.”

“It is often little things that are hardest to stand.”

“Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. . . youth's characteristic chronological snobbery.”

“You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.”

“Disobedience to conscience makes conscience blind.”

“The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.”

“There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.”

“If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.”

“Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”

“You're a mere chick. I remember you when you were a egg. Don't come trying to teach me, sir. Crabs and crumpets!”

“I can answer that only by hearsay, returned the Guide, for pain is a secret which he has shared with your race and not with mine; and you would find it as hard to explain suffering to me as I would find it to reveal to you the secrets of the Mountain people. But those who know best say this, that any liberal man would choose the pain of this desire, even for ever, rather than the peace of feeling it no longer; and that though the best thing is to have, the next best is to want, and the worst of all is not to want.”

“I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.”

“You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better - the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read.”