Quotes By C. S. Lewis

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

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

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

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.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

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

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

We are what we believe we are.

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

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

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

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

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.

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

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

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

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

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

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.

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

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.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

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.

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.