C. S. Lewis on Friendship

"My form remains one, though the matter in it changes continually. I am, in that respect, like a curve in a waterfall."

"Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

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

"The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival."

"Mr. Sensible learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend."

"All that is not eternal is eternally out of date."

"I am sorry that my convictions do not allow me to repeat my friend's offer, said one of the others. But I have had to abandon the humanitarian and egalitarian fancies. His name was Mr. Neo-Classical."

"y friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers."

"Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'"

"Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure . The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."

"Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up – painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other — that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering."