CS Lewis Quotes

Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human.

Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.

Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

Not sense data or atoms or electrons or packets of energy, but purposes, interests, and meanings, constitute the underlying facts of human experience.

Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers?

When vitality runs high, death takes men by surprise. But if they close their eyes to this possibility, what they gain in peace they lose in sensibility and significance.

War is both the product of an earlier corruption, and a producer of new corruptions.

The mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them.

If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.

Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.

The self holds both a hell and a heaven.

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid.

In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.

Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group...devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.

Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.

If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.

In vulgar usage, progress has come to mean limitless movement in space and time, accompanied, necessarily, by an equally limitless command of energy: culminating in limitless destruction.

War is a specific product of civilization.

Genuine [economic] value lies in the power to sustain or enrich life

One's worst enormities remain within, and it is only one's vulgar commonplaces of error and folly that turn into murders and suicides, treasons, infidelities, and betrayals.

We have lost faith in the formal powers of the mind, not, as some suppose, because our universe is too difficult to grasp, but because we lack the inner principle of order.

Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.

Safety razors make it hard to grow beards in America: America would be a better place if there were a few bearded, savage, terrible old men.

Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.

Even Solon Gregg was finding it hard to speak to a woman who had just paid hard cash for tampons and on her face wore the look of a woman who meant to use them, as advertised.

You shouldn't be able to do a swim at the North Pole, it should be frozen over.

If you've got a problem and you multiply it by 50-million people, it becomes unsolvable, but if you've got a problem and you divide it by 50-million people, it becomes solvable.

I was very, very lucky because I started swimming when most of the landmarks in the world had not been swum.

Mount Everest is a very spiritual place, it's a beautiful mountain.

I do have spare time and I love to read, and I love just to go to a national park and just relax and just think. But most of the time, it's swimming or talking.

Success doesn’t always look like what we think it looks like.

The disruption caused by globalization and technology (what Tom Friedman calls hyperconnectedness) will be around for the rest of our professional lives.

For example, I wear clothes I buy at trendy shops because I don't care much about clothing. If someone wants to create a trend around clothing, I'll happily and blindly follow.

There are not enough forums where institutions invite their workers to share their failures in a constructive way so the organization can move forward.

In companies, there are three activities that should be labeled better. First there is the "CORE" which is the thing the company does that its customers pay it to do.

However, there's nothing more inspiring than a company that does solve problems and those problems are captured as part of a larger story.

I believe in labeling things.

Apple makes computers and they have to be great at providing the product they promised every individual who wants to purchase from them. This is where they should spend the bulk of their energy.

I believe that only a subset of us is meant to lead. The rest want to follow.

When I started out, I wanted to have everything solved by the time I was 30. That didn't happen. Instead, I realized that the journey is the destination, that the work.

I was never going to be one of Nobel prize winners.

My fighting spirit has often seemed out of place.

I grew up in a modern business environment and did not experience the kind of prejudice that my mother and grandfather experienced.

There is a direct line between the communications work I did to protest tuition increases at my school and what I do today. Plus it had one other benefit...it got me kicked out of college!

I found that I loved producing that kind of propaganda and I loved the power that a few students with a Macintosh computer could wield. I was hooked on communications at that point.