Happy Birthday, Mr. Lewis!

I love C.S. Lewis. I will be forever grateful to him for the profound ways in which his writings have impacted my views of life, others, and myself. 

Seeing as how today is his 118th birthday, let's enjoy some of the fabulous gems he's left for us:

We are what we believe we are.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me. 

He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away his hand; and if only the will to walk is really there, he is pleased even with their stumbles.

Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.

One of the drawbacks about adventures is that when you come to the most beautiful places you are often too anxious and hurried to appreciate them.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. 

I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait.

I believe in Christ like I believe in the sun. Not because I can see it, but by it I can see everything else.

Those who have not learned to ask Him for childish things will have less readiness to ask Him for great ones. 

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. 

We have nothing, if not belief.

The grand point is not to wear the garb, nor use the brogue of religion, but to process the life of God within, and feel and think as Jesus would have done because of that inner life. Small is the value of extended religion, unless it is the outcome of a life within. 

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road. In that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

We read to know we are not alone.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally - and often far more - worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are. 

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward. 

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do. 

[To have faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you. 

Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. 

Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor: act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find on of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. 

I don't believe that good work is ever done in a hurry. 

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations-these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals who we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit-immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously-no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

Mmmm. It's like chocolate for the soul.