Quotes by C. S. Lewis

Nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges that it should be resistant should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee.

The future is something which every one reaches at the rate of sixty miles an hour whatever he does whoever he is.

Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

Nothing is more dangerous to ones own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.

What I call my self now is hardly a person at all. Its mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.

What we call Mans power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Thirty was so strange for me. Ive really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

You cant get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us... While what we call our own life remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make our own life less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

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

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Good English is whatever educated people talk so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

History isnt just the story of bad people doing bad things. Its quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.