16 C.S. Lewis Quotes for 2016

Here are 16 quotations attributed to my very favorite writer, C.S. Lewis. I pray they help you in 2016 and beyond.

1. ON FRIENDSHIP… “Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'”
2. ON LOVE… “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. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
3. ON SUFFERING… “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
4. ON EVIL… “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”
5. ON AGE… “It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.”
6. ON FAITH… “If what you call your ‘faith’ in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what he says, then it is not Faith at all—not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory of Him.”
7. ON CHRIST… “We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.”
8. ON HISTORY… “All that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
9. ON KINDNESS… “The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men.”
10. ON DESIRE… “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.”
11. ON LOVE… “Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling…Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go… But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling.”
12. ON TRUTH… “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust?A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”
13. ON BOOKS… “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
14. ON BAD LEADERS… “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
15. ON LIFE… “All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”
16. ON CHRISTIANITY… “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…”