C. S. Lewis Quotes

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.

Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.

I've always been really curious about the limits of human capability.

I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.

Where humans are concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure.

Be dead in life, and you will not live in death. Let your soul die strenuously, and not live in weakness. Not only those who suffer death for the sake of faith in Christ are martyrs; but also those who die because of their observance of His commandments.

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

Let me die fighting. Two years of physical suffering have taken from me twenty years of life. But the soul changes not, does it? It is there, the same madcap - Atman - mad upon one idea, intent and intense.

Pain is the great teacher of mankind. Beneath its breath souls develop.

His soul was bigger than a body's ought to be.

It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives.

Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.

Nothing befalls any man which he is not fitted to endure.

The scar will remain, but it is better for a man to lose both arms than his soul; and these hard years, instead of being lost, may be made the most precious of your lives, if they teach you to rule yourselves.

Man can only endure a certain degree of unhappiness; what is beyond that either annihilates him or passes by him and leaves him apathetic

A man can laugh while he suffers.

Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.

How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.

Is a diamond less valuable because it is covered with mud? God sees the changeless beauty of our souls. He knows we are not our mistakes.

He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.

As such, I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.