Clive Staples Lewis

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Quote	Categories	Rating	Rate
"It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter."	Ability, Birth, Death
"Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone."	Knowledge, Love, Sin
"A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own."	Death, Men
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may 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."	Change, Death, Evil
"Friendship is not necessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."	Art, Friends
"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when 'I'm as good as you' has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway, the teachers -- or should I say nurses? -- will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men."	Ability, Age, Art
"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."	Age, Art, Change
"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one."	Friends, Men
"[Prosperity] knits a man to the world. He thinks he's 'finding his place in it,' while really it is finding its place in him."	Men
"What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard."	Change, Friends, Time
"Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither."	Art
"The safest road to hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."	Miscellaneous
"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."	Faith, Religion, Sin
"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."	Lies, Men, Military
"The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."	Miscellaneous
"The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing than worshipping ... 'Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god."	Excellence, Military, Monarchy
"Just a hurried line...to tell a story which puts the contrast between our feast of the Nativity and all this ghastly Xmas racket at it's lowest. My brother heard a woman on a 'bus say, as the 'bus passed a church with a Crib outside it, Oh Lor'! They bring religion into everything. Look- they're dragging it even into Christmas now!"	Men, Religion, Women
"When we lose one blessing, another is often, most unexpectedly, given in its place."	Sin
"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."	Honesty, Lies, Religion
"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."	Lies, Religion
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Browse Clive Staples Lewis quotes by category:

Ability	Age	Art
Birth	Change	Creativity
Death	Democracy	Desires
Dictatorship	Education	Evil
Excellence	Faith	Freedom
Friends	Government	Greatness
Honesty	Hope	Ignorance
Imagination	Intelligence	Knowledge
Learning	Liberty	Lies
Life	Love	Men
Military	Miscellaneous	Monarchy
Patience	Pride	Reading
Religion	School	Sin
Sleeping	Teaching	Time
Truth	Wants	War
Wisdom	Wishing	Women
Writing