2,254 Quotes by C. S. Lewis

The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

In a sense it (Christianity) creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteousness and loving.

Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works.

We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.

We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

But to hint and hover...when we most wish to be free of them; what is this but cat-and-mouse play, blindman's bluff, a mere jugglery? Why must holy places be dark places?

Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. . . look to Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

If we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.