Quotes from C. S. Lewis

For they (art and music) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.

The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself

Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Law Giver.

Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved.

We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good; if bad, because it works in us patience, humility, contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.

Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.

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

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.

In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.

You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.

We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism--the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good.

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.

A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

I am in love and out of it I will not go.

The Opposite of Love is not hate, but power

The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.

I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. It doesn't change God - it changes me.

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.