Lewis was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, and both authors were leading figures in the English faculty at Oxford University and in the informal Oxford literary group known as the “Inklings”. According to his memoir Surprised by Joy, Lewis had been baptised in the Church of Ireland at birth, but fell away from his faith during his adolescence. Owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, at the age of 32 Lewis returned to Christianity, becoming “a very ordinary layman of the Church of England”. His conversion had a profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.

In 1956, he married the American writer Joy Gresham, 17 years his junior, who died four years later of cancer at the age of 45.

Lewis died three years after his wife, as the result of renal failure. His death came one week before his 65th birthday. Media coverage of his death was minimal, as he died on 22 November 1963 – the same day that U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the same day another famous author died, Aldous Huxley.

1. Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

2. An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

3. Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

4. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

5. Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

6. 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.

7. Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

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

9. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

10. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

11. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

12. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

13. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

14. 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.

15. We are what we believe we are.

16. You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

17. You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

18. What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what kind of a person you are.

19. The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.

20. I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.

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

22. Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.

23. You play the hand you’re dealt. I think the game’s worthwhile.