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C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis
If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.
Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.
Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of 'religion.'
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation.
For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.
We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.
Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would hav
You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.