Quotes by Jack Lewis

The chief end of man, as I see it, is to find security, have liberty to express his abilities, enjoy the love of family and friends, and to secure recognition of his talents, to worship God in his own way, and to participate in a government that will protect him in his exercise of these liberties, and by education and training in the development of the arts and sciences, and the techniques of their application, help him to find his proper place in the scheme of things.

Sometimes, though not often [in meetings of the Inklings], it would happen that no one had anything to read to us. On these occasions the fun would be riotous, with Jack at the top of his form and enjoying every minute - 'no sound delights me more', he once said, 'than male laughter'. At the Inklings his talk was an outpouring of wit, nonsense, whimsy, dialectical swordplay, and pungent judgement such as I have rarely heard equalled - no mere show put on for the occasion, either, since it was often quite as brilliant when he and I were alone together. . . . In his Preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, Jack gave a lively and moving account of what this circle meant to him.

As all his friends will bear witness, he was a man with an outstanding gift for pastime with good company, for laughter and the love of friends - a gift which found full scope in any number of holidays and walking tours, the joyous character of his response to these being well conveyed in his letters. He had, indeed, a remarkable talent for friendship, particularly for friendship of an uproarious kind, and argumentative but never quarrelsome.

I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate to the left or right, the readers will most certainly go into it.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for tomorrow, or for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those claims only of tomorrow which have to be repeated today are the joy of today: the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere until God has made it.

The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Everyone there (heaven) is filled with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking a t the source from which it comes.

This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a great rumor going around the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

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