Happy Birthday Clive Staples 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.

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.

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

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.

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

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

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.

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.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

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

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

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.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

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.

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

We are what we believe we are.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

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.

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.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

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.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.