“You will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. 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... Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.”
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C.S. Lewis
“It is because they have no Oyarsa,' said one of the pupils.
It is because everyone of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,' said Augray.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man's outward actions – if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before – then I think we must suspect that his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.”
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C.S. Lewis
“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.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
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C.S. Lewis
“You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.”
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C.S. Lewis
“That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Yes, I know,' interrupted Puddleglum. 'And few return to the sunlit lands. You needn't say it again. You are a chap of one idea, aren't you?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
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C.S. Lewis
“In a word, 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 imperturable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.”
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C.S. Lewis
“This is where men, even the trustiest, fail us. Their heart is never so wholly given to any matter but that some trifle of a meal, or a drink, or a sleep, or a joke, or a girl, may come in between them and it, and then (even if you are a queen) you'll get no more good out of them until they've had their way.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
―
C.S. Lewis
