C.S. Lewis

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

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.

Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . ."

WHAT DRAWS PEOPLE TO BE FRIENDS IS THAT THEY SEE THE SAME TRUTH. THEY SHARE IT.

He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.

 

Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time.

 

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

 

Either this man [Jesus] 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.

 

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

I was not born to be free. I was born to adore and to obey.

We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.

It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance.

When we lose one blessing, another is often, most unexpectedly, given in its place.

The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of our attention would have been on God.

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

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins.

Prosperity knits a man to the world. He thinks he's 'finding his place in it,' while really it is finding its place in him.

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

Why love if losing hurts so much we love to know that we are not alone.

Spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.

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 no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality.

If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.

A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon.

The present is the point at which time touches eternity.

 

The safest road to hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

 

It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

 

Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved.

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

 

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.

Anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it.

Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.