C. S. Lewis

For they (art and music) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.

When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.

Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.

Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Law Giver.

War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.

You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.

I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself.

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 a child again, even now... You have gone wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.

The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.

I have seen landscapes . . . which, under a particular light, make me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.

Many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and... God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.

When we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.

If the immutable heart can be grieved by the puppets of its own making, it is Divine Omnipotence, no other, that has subjected it, freely, and in a humility that passes understanding. If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God, but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door.

The continual looking forward to the eternal world is not a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.

Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.

Other than heaven, the only place where one's heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell.

The absent are easily refuted.

A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.