Clive Staples Lewis

I don’t mean another planet, you know; they’re part of our world and you could get to them if you went far enough—but a really Other World—another Nature another universe—somewhere you would never reach even if you travelled through the space of this universe for ever and ever—a world that could be reached only by Magic—well

No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.

“You have not made the first joke; you have only been the first joke.”

For though the world is not five hours old an evil has already entered it.

Things always work according to their nature.

All get what they want; they do not always like it.”

Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good.

we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.

I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in ‘the High Countries’. In that sense it will be true for those who have completed the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven everywhere.

Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell.