C. S. Lewis

“I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.”

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”

“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'”

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”

“Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.”

“A man, an adult, is precisely what he [Aeneas] is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy.”

“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.”

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

“I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.”

“As to Macarthur, I don't feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they're always a mass of lies & misunderstandings: so I conclude they're no better in the places where I don't know.”

“I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.”

“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.”

“I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.”

“He [the child] does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

“I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.”

“Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.”

“Where we find a difficulty we may always expect that a discovery awaits us. Where there is cover we hope for game.”

“The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.”

“A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can't quite place. I think the something is 'the whole quality of life as we actually experience it.'”

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

“"Everything" is a subject on which there is not much to be said.”

“There are some things about your own village that you never know until you have been away from it.”

“A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis.”

“Jove laughed to seeThe abyss empeopled, his bliss imparted, the throng that was his and no longer he.”

“Looking for God — or Heaven — by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.”

“[M]y friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”

“Leavis demands moral earnestness; I prefer morality. . . . I'd sooner live among people who don’t cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards.”

“The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend.”

“He begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth-century Rationalism Which can explain away religion by any number of methods.”

“If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.”