The Quotable C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis was a prolific writer and a brilliant thinker. For today's blog post, I've listed some of my favorite quotes from his writings. Some you may recognize from The Screwtape Letters. I would like you to choose one that speaks to you and respond to it. If you have another quote of his that you would like to write about, feel free.

The last quote on this page never fails to give me chills.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

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 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.

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

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

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.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

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.

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.

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.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to 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.

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

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.