BY SOFO ARCHON
Here are some of the most inspiring quotes from the British novelist C. S. Lewis on topics including, but not limited to, integrity, pride, failure, truth, love, and forgiveness.
“Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.”
“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
“Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”
“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”
“The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.”
“Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.”
“This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”
“We do not retreat from reality, we rediscover it.”
“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.”
“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.”
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.”
“Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.”
“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.”
“I have learned now that while those who speak about ones miseries usually hurt, but those who keep silence hurt more.”
“We meet no ordinary people in our lives.”
“Things never happen the same way twice.”
“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
“For the present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
“Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”
“I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.”
“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
“This moment contains all moments.”