Quotes from C. S. Lewis

A man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.

I cannot understand how a man can appear in print claiming to disbelieve everything that he presupposes when he puts on the surplice. I feel it is a form of prostitution.

We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or child.

A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can't put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover.

One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up.

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

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

A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women.

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

Tea should be taken in solitude...

The truth is that if we are to have translation at all we must have periodical retranslation. There is no such thing as translating a book into another language once and for all, for a language is a changing thing. If your son is to have clothes it is no good buying him a suit once and for all: he will grow out of it and have to be reclothed.

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

Homemaking is surely in reality the most important work in the world.

There are no ordinary people.. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.

There is no use in talking as if forgiveness were easy. For we find that the work of forgiveness has to be done over and over again.

We are...a Divine work of art, something that God is making...something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.

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.

No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights.

Aslan's instructions always work; there are no exceptions.

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

As for wrinkles--Pshaw! Why shouldn't we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.

When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.