C. S. Lewis Quotes

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.

Wishful thinking is no substitute for reality.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

I used to believe that if I could do certain things - write a book or be a successful musician - that I'd be transformed into a happy person, but it doesn't work that way.

Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying. Personally, I have never been able to kill myself.

A crown, if it hurts us, is not worth wearing.

One promises much, to avoid giving little.

It would have been more comfortable to remain silent.

I've learned the hard lesson that you can't pin your heart on anything until it's a completely done deal.

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.

Nothing lives up to what you imagine. It changes, shifts, becomes something else.

Their lives have been largely defined by failure and you would think the prospect of marriage, which is supposed to be bountiful and hopeful, it's just really another kind of tangential thing in his life.

If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it the light of the oncoming train.

The suicide arrives at the conclusion that what he is seeking does not exist; the seeker concludes that what he has not yet looked in the right place.

We don’t like to face unpleasant reality. We want our leaders to tell us what we want to hear …. You cannot manipulate reality. Reality will real its ugly head

The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.

In the end, will truth matter? Of course truth will matter. Truth isn't relative. But there's going to be a great sacrifice on the way to getting truth to matter to us again, to finding out why it does, and God knows what shape that sacrifice will take.

Things aren't always the fairy tale that you thought they were.

I've burned all my bridges for the sake of getting as near as I can to the truth. And after years of searching for the truth, you find that that's all you can bear. The truth and nothing but the truth.

People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.

"Comfort" is no test of truth; on the contrary, truth is often far from being "comfortable".

There's little comfort in the wise