A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

by C.S. Lewis

Or you may realise that, instead of saying your prayers, you ought to be downstairs writing a letter, or helping your wife to wash-up.

No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did.

The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.

The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.

“all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

On the one hand, God’s demand for perfection need not discourage you in the least in your present attempts to be good, or even in your present failures.

Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making.

If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions—if he continues to be just as snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before—then I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary;

Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ‘religion’ mean nothing unless they make our actual behaviour better;