Quotes from CS Lewis

Friendship is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

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

We do not see into men's hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge.

Lewis encourages his cancer-stricken and temporarily depressed wife that uncertainty rather than hopelessness is our cross.

The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil's whole structure away.

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.

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form...The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.

The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union the sexual from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.

There must be several young women who would render the Christian life intensely difficult to him if only you could persuade him to marry one of them.