C. S. Lewis

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

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

“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 th...”

“How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.”

“Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.”

“Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us... While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him....”

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

“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...”

“Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.”

“Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.”

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

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

“Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in deal...”

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

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

“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 lis...”

“If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, o...”

“History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.”

“I'm tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.”

“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...”