Quotes by "C. S. Lewis"

You must make your choice: either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Courage, dearheart

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

If there is a wasp in the room, I’d like to be able to see it.

Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

God is easy to please but hard to satisfy.

No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power; in every mixed movement the efficacy comes from the good elements not from the bad. But the presence of the bad elements is not irrelevant to the direction the efficacy takes.

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.

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.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

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?

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