"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

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

"(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

"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)

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

"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)

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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)

"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

"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)

"A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

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

"[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"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

"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

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

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

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

"The stamp of the Saint is that he can waive his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus."
— 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

"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."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."
— C.S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold)

"Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say. "
— C.S. Lewis

"You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content."
— C.S. Lewis (Prince Caspian)

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

"The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort. Now a clearly maintained distinction between what the Faith actually says and what you would like it to have said or what you understand or what you personally find helpful or think probable, forces your audience to realize that you are tied to your data just as the scientist is tied by the results of the experiments; that you are not just saying what you like. This immediately helps them realize that what is being discussed is a question about objective fact — not gas about ideals and points of view."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"He'll be coming and going" he had said. "One day you'll see him and another you won't. He doesn't like being tied down--and of course he has other countries to attend to. It's quite all right. He'll often drop in. Only you mustn't press him. He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion."
— C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

"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)

"It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)"
— C.S. Lewis

"Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality."
— C.S. Lewis

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

"I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass."
— C.S. Lewis

"God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker."
— C.S. Lewis

"Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come."
— C.S. Lewis (Perelandra)

"I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us."
— 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