C. S. Lewis on truth and lies

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 safe 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.

Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats1795–1821Ode on a Grecian Urn, Stanza 5. The final lines of this poem have been rendered in various ways in different editions, some placing the entire last two lines within quotation marks, others only the statement “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” …In context

• Beauty

This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

William Shakespeare1564–1616Hamlet (1600–1), Act I, scene iii.In context

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Winston Churchill1874–1965