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

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.
C. S. Lewis

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
C. S. Lewis

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
C. S. Lewis

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C. S. Lewis

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
C. S. Lewis

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
C. S. Lewis

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
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


Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
C. S. Lewis

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
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

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
C. S. Lewis

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
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

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
C. S. Lewis

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C. S. Lewis

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

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
C. S. Lewis