C. S. Lewis

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

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

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

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point."

"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."

"Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success."

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."

"I gave in, and admitted that God was God."

"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."

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."

"Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature."

"Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate."

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

"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."

"Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest."

"There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them."

"Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult."

"This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted."

"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 my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God."

"What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument."