C. S. Lewis

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.

The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.

It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.

You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity.

The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.

Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue.

A little lie is like a little pregnancy it doesn't take long before everyone knows.

God, in the end, gives people what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair?

He (God) loved us not because we are lovable, but because He is love.

Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.

Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself.

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

To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is 'remains.'

You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.

The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.