C.S. Lewis

“The word 'human' refers to something more than the bodily form or even the rational mind. It refers also to that community of blood and experience which unites all men and women on the Earth.”

“No man who cares about originality will ever be original. It's the man who's only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original -- and doesn't notice it.”

“You'll never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking what sort of impression you make.”

“The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self changed into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One's most private wishes, one's point of view, are the things that have to be changed.”

“God has infinite attention, infinite leisure to spare for each one of us. He doesn't have to take us in the line. You're as much alone with Him as if you were the only thing He'd ever created.”

“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.”

“Thanks for my life, my cure, my breakfast - and my lesson.”

“The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that's new to him.”

“Little from you is really a bit too much”

“It has actually become very necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.”

“Anger is the fluid that love bleeds when it gets cut.”

“You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.”

“Plato rightly taught that virtue is one. You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues. If, being cowardly, conceited, and slothful, you have never yet done a fellow creature great mischief, that is only because your neighbour's welfare has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, self-approval, or ease. Every vice leads to cruelty.”

“He'll be coming and going. One day you'll see him and another you won't.”

“If things are real, they're there all the time.”

“The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!”

“One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He hasabsorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; (2) He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.”

“That’s true to life.Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow orreflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep onthinking about the fact that you suffer.”

“Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.”

“Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”

“Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own.”

“The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.”

“At present we are on the outside… the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the pleasures we see. But all the pages of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get “in”… We will put on glory… that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.We do not want to merely “see” beauty -- though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

“An odd by-product of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.”

“But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden-haired, and all princes in those parts desired her to be their Queen, and her own people called her Queen Lucy the Valiant.”

“Those are the big mountains between Archenland and Narnia. I must have come through the pass in the night. What luck that I hit it! -- at least, it wasn't luck at all, really. It was Him! And now, I'm in Narnia.”

“The stars never lie, but Men and Beasts do.”

“Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we've got to do (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of these three reasons, things like reading books they don't like because other people read them.”

“Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles.”

“It is not fatigue simply as such that produces the anger, but unexpected demands on a man already tired.”

“Are not all lifelong friendships born in the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that which you were born desiring.”

“Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people”

“While friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.”

“Amar é, sempre, ser vulnerável. Para que nunca se sofra com isso, aconselha-se não se amar algo, ou mesmo, alguém. Se sugere proteger a si mesmo nos próprios hobbies, mimos e zelos, evitar qualquer envolvimento com as pessoas, guardar o coração na segurança do caixão do próprio ego. Dessa forma, nessa tumba segura e tenaz, sem movimento ou ar, o seu coração provavelmente mudará para melhor. Sim, sim, ele não se partirá, antes se tornará indestrutível, impenetrável, invencível ou inalienável!: ele nunca precisará de algum perdão.Mas essa comprável alternativa sistemática de proteção de tragédias, é preciso que se diga, é condenatória. Isso, porque o único lugar que existe além do céu, onde se pode estar perfeitamente a salvo de todos os acidentes e perturbações do amor, é o inferno”

“The fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighborhood of the Holy.”

“Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.”

“Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.”

“If that (to travel hopefully is better to arrive) were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for.”

“Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now.”

“Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?”

“Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.”

“But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

“He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.~C.S. Lewis~”

“I have come," said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.”

“That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves part of eternal reality.”

“The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy.She is the bird that evades every net: the wild deer that leaps every pitfall.Like the mother bird to its chickens or a shield to the armed knight: so is the Lord to her mind, in His unchanging lucidity.Bogies will not scare her in the dark: bullets will not frighten her in the day.Falsehoods tricked out as truths assail her in vain: she sees through the lie as if it were glass.The invisible germ will not harm her: nor yet the glittering sunstroke.A thousand fail to solve the problem, ten thousand choose the wrong turning: but she passes safely through.He details immortal gods to attend her: upon every road where she must travel.They take her hand at hard places: she will not stub her toes in the dark.She may walk among lions and rattlesnakes: among dinosaurs and nurseries of lionettes.He fills her brim full with immensity of life: he leads her to see the world’s desire.”

“Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.”

“Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there'd be no difficulty.”

“There is something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there's also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefor, when it falls, a fiercer devil.”

“The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”