2,254 Quotes by C. S. Lewis

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

The fact that you are giving money to charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.

What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all.

I have often repented of speech but hardly ever of silence.

Grief. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.

Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?

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