C. S. Lewis quotes for UPSC

The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.

This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.

It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness and chivalry 'masculine' when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them, to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as 'feminine'.

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.

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

As to Macarthur, I don't feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they're always a mass of lies & misunderstandings: so I conclude they're no better in the places where I don't know.

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.

Where we find a difficulty we may always expect that a discovery awaits us. Where there is cover we hope for game.

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 have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

There are some things about your own village that you never know until you have been away from it.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

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 shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.