(from The Four Loves) The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one.'

I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun -- not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

(from Perelandra) Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely superfluous, and your love shall be like His, born neither of your need nor of my deserving, but a plain bounty. Blessed be He!

(from Til We Have Faces)
"Are the gods not just?"
"Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?"

(from Til We Have Faces) I was with book, as a woman is with child.

You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better - the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

(from Studies in Words) Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up save 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. To love is to be vulnerable.

(from Mere Christianity) Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

(from Of Other Worlds) Sometimes fairy-stories may say best what's to be said.

(from Selected Literary Essays) Only those adults who have retained, with whatever additions and enrichments, their first childish response to poetry unimpaired, can be said to have grown up at all.

(Lewis's recounting of a poem written by a young boy for Easter morning, in Reflections on the Psalms)
Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

G. C. Lichtenberg

The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.

Wendy Liebman

I've been on so many blind dates, I should get a free dog.

Abraham Lincoln

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

The best way to destroy your enemy is to make him your friend.

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back.

I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

(from an Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, September 30, 1859) It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Hypocrite: The man who murdered his parents, and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.

He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.

Anne Morrow Lindberg

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.

I feel we are all islands -- in a common sea.

Walter Lippmann

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.

Livy

No law is quite appropriate for all.

John Locke

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

Frederick Locker-Lampson

The world's as ugly as sin, and almost as delightful.

Vince Lombardi

Winning is not everything. It's the only thing.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.

Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows, which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

No man is so poor as to have nothing worth giving.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Next to being a great poet, is the power of understanding one.

All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.

Glorious indeed is the world of God around us, but more glorious the world of God within us. There lies the Land of a Song; there lies the poet's native land.

Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.

The holiest of holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth

If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.

Sophia Loren

When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts . . . A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.

Joe Louis

Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

Richard Lovelace

(from To Althea from Prison) Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.

James Russell Lowell

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

John Lubbock

What we see depends on mainly what we look for.

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

Halford E. Luccock

Many years ago Rudyard Kipling gave an address at McGill University in Montreal. He said one striking thing which deserves to be remembered. Warning the students against an over-concern for money, or position, or glory, he said: "Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are."

Clare Boothe Luce

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it should end there.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, She doesn't have what it takes. They will say, Women don't have what it takes.

Lucretius

The falling drops at last will wear the stone.