C. S. Lewis

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

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.

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. 

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. 

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

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

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

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

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without 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.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

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.

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

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.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

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

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

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.

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