"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
— C.S. Lewis

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

"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."
— C.S. Lewis

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
— C.S. Lewis

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

"(The Christian) does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."
— C.S. Lewis

"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
— C.S. Lewis

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."
— C.S. Lewis

"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond."
— C.S. Lewis

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

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

"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."
— C.S. Lewis

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word "darkness" on the walls of his cell."
— C.S. Lewis

"God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing."
— C.S. Lewis

"I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."
— C.S. Lewis (The Silver Chair)

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."
— C.S. Lewis

"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..."
— C.S. Lewis

"It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."
— C.S. Lewis

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

"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
— C.S. Lewis

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
— C.S. Lewis

"I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God- it changes me."
— C.S. Lewis

"Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
— C.S. Lewis

"I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once."
— C.S. Lewis

"The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career. "
— C.S. Lewis

"It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
— C.S. Lewis (Weight of Glory and Other Addresses)

"I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity."
— C.S. Lewis

"Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."
— C.S. Lewis (The World's Last Night: And Other Essays)

"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."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it."
— C.S. Lewis

"He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less."
— C.S. Lewis

"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."
— C.S. Lewis

"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."
— C.S. Lewis (The Magician's Nephew)

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
— C.S. Lewis (The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader")

"You can make anything by writing."
— C.S. Lewis

"Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably."
— C.S. Lewis

"She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened. "
— C.S. Lewis (The Great Divorce)

"It isn't Narnia, you know," sobbed Lucy. "It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?"
"But you shall meet me, dear one," said Aslan.
"Are -are you there too, Sir?" said Edmund.
"I am," said Aslan. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."
— C.S. Lewis (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil."
— C.S. Lewis

"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."
— C.S. Lewis

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
— C.S. Lewis

"It is a good rule . . . to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books."
— C.S. Lewis

"It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence."
— C.S. Lewis

"Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good."
— C.S. Lewis

"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."
— C.S. Lewis

"Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys' philosophies--these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either."
— C.S. Lewis

"Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn."
— C.S. Lewis