Quotes from C. S. Lewis

when pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.

According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

It is important early in life to acquire the power of reading sense wherever you happen to be.

We who have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous of our being which we owe to authors.

A Christian is not someone who never goes wrong, but one who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin again, because the Christ-life is inside him.

The beauty of life, is that you don't have to be modernly beautiful to live it.

Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death.

Every day in a life fills the whole life with expectations and memory.

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life.

When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on.

What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life, matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations.

When we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

Of course it should be pointed out that, though all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that he cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted him in this life.

Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life.

War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.

Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.

Humour is...the all-consoling and...the all-excusing, grace of life.

The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.

Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam--he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.

There is a difference between a private devotional life and a corporate one. Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa.

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.

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.

I think it very wrong to pray for people while they are in distress and then not to continue praying, now with thanksgiving, when they are relieved.