Quotes by C. S. Lewis

"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest."

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

"Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time."

"Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither."

"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."

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

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."

"What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument."