Quotes from C. S. Lewis

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

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.

You can't know, you can only believe - or not.

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.

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.

Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted---i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk---don't keep on looking at it.

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.

The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four.

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

I was with book, as a woman is with child.

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

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.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.

A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.

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

Faith... is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.

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

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