C. S. Lewis Quotes

Irish - Author November 29, 1898 - November 22, 1963 Read full biography

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

Success Failure Achievement Road

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

Roads Decision World You

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Change Fly Bird You

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Friendship Art Value Philosophy

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Myself Experience World Find

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.

Sun Believe See Everything

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

Important True Infinite Only

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

Man Walking Progress You

History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.

Good History People Good Things

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Life Respect Daily Reality

Top 10
C. S. Lewis
Quotes

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Loneliness Yourself Look You

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

Day Shadow Live Grief

When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you'd been the only man in the world.

Man World You Only

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

World You Regret Better

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

Teacher Down Task Modern Cut

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

Inspirational World Small Story

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.

Faith Passion People Feel

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

Courage Testing Virtue Point Virtues

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them.

Long Promises Always Word

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'

God People Done Way

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Road Hell Without Milestones

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

Good May Tyranny Most

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.

Art Man Truth Caring

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.

Wife Man Sleep Eating

What I call my 'self' now is hardly a person at all. It's mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.

Nature Education God Self

'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'

Myself Day Mind Lion

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