Art & Creativity Quote by C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis, Author

About this Quote

Lewis pulls off a daring bait-and-switch: he calls friendship "unnecessary" precisely to rescue it from the grubby language of utility. In a culture that instinctively asks what things are for, he starts by granting the premise - survival is the baseline metric - and then punctures it. Friendship, like philosophy and art, won’t keep you fed, warm, or medically stable. That’s the point. If your highest goal is merely to persist, you’ve already accepted a thin picture of what a human life is.

The subtext is gently combative. Lewis is arguing against a modern habit of reducing meaning to function: relationships as networking, art as content, education as job training. By pairing friendship with philosophy and art, he smuggles it into a category of goods that can’t be justified by spreadsheets without being diminished. The ellipsis does quiet rhetorical work too: it invites you to fill in the rest of the utilitarian ledger before he flips it, suggesting that the reader is complicit in the very reduction he’s about to challenge.

Context matters: Lewis wrote as a Christian thinker formed by war, conversion, and a deep investment in older accounts of virtue and community. He’s not naive about survival; he’s suspicious of making it the only standard. The line ultimately reframes friendship as a kind of meaning-making technology: not an accessory to life, but the medium that makes life feel like more than endurance. Survival is biology. Friendship is what keeps biology from becoming the whole story.

Quote Details

Topic	Friendship
Source	Verified source: The Four Loves (C. S. Lewis, 1960) Text match: 95.00% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival. (Chapter: “Philia (Friendship)” (often labeled Chapter 4 in some editions); page varies by edition (commonly cited as p. 71 or within pp. 87–127 in some printings)). This quotation is from C. S. Lewis’s own work, The Four Loves, in the section/chapter on friendship (Greek: philia). The earliest publication of The Four Loves is 1960 (first edition publisher widely noted as Geoffrey Bles in the UK). Page numbers differ across editions; many modern quote references cite around p. 71, while some printings place the Philia section later (e.g., a range like pp. 87–127 for that chapter in certain editions). Other candidates (1) Economics of Good and Evil (Tomas Sedlacek, 2011) compilation97.3% ... C. S. Lewis puts it , " Friendship is unnecessary , like philosophy , like art . . . . It has no survival value ;...
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