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.


C.S. Lewis

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C.S. LEWIS
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
C.S. LEWIS
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
C.S. LEWIS
I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up o...
C.S. LEWIS
There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he...
C.S. LEWIS
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking d...
C.S. LEWIS
They tell me, Lord, that when I seem
To be in speech with you.
Since but one voice is heard, i...
C.S. LEWIS
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences,...
C.S. LEWIS
Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself. In reality, because it is ...
C.S. LEWIS
The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I wa...
C.S. LEWIS
Once when I had remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, ...
C.S. LEWIS
Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to av...
C.S. LEWIS
We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the ris-
ing generation. I am an oldster myself and...
C.S. LEWIS
Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike t...
C.S. LEWIS
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C.S. LEWIS
And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, am...
C.S. LEWIS
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
C.S. LEWIS
Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon hi...
C.S. LEWIS
I desired dragons with a profound desire.
C.S. LEWIS
What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on wh...
C.S. LEWIS
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole w...
C.S. LEWIS
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of...
C.S. LEWIS
But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do ...
C.S. LEWIS
You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect th...
C.S. LEWIS
Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don't go trying to use the same route twice. Ind...
C.S. LEWIS
People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, 'If you keep a lot ...
C.S. LEWIS
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
C.S. LEWIS
We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities, and anyone who has watched gluttons shov...
C.S. LEWIS
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen; not only because I see it, but becaus...
C.S. LEWIS
In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A y...
C.S. LEWIS
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies t...
C.S. LEWIS
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
C.S. LEWIS
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give...
C.S. LEWIS
Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he...
C.S. LEWIS
You are told to love your neighbour as yourself. How do you love yourself? When I look into my own m...
C.S. LEWIS
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that...
C.S. LEWIS
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explan...
C.S. LEWIS
All joy emphasises our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are...
C.S. LEWIS
A faith in culture is as bad as a faith in religion; both expressions imply a turning away from thos...
C.S. LEWIS
Faith... is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.
C.S. LEWIS
What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong tu...
C.S. LEWIS
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precis...
C.S. LEWIS
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead ...
C.S. LEWIS
Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth, and you will get neither.
C.S. LEWIS
“If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we ...
C.S. LEWIS
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possib...
C.S. LEWIS
If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of t...
C.S. LEWIS
Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, b...
C.S. LEWIS
I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The gre...
C.S. LEWIS
The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epic...
C.S. LEWIS
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense ...
C.S. LEWIS
The thing is to rely on God. The time will come when you will regard all this misery as a small pric...
C.S. LEWIS
We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walk...
C.S. LEWIS