C. S. Lewis

It's always winter but it's never Christmas.

You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain.

How little people know who think that holiness is dull... When one meets the real thing, it's irresistible!

I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one.

Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.

Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly - are done worst when we try hardest to do them.

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.

One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.