Clive Staples Lewis was a lay theologian and writer from the United Kingdom. God, man, and spirit are all explored in unique ways in these insightful C.S. Lewis quotes.
Lewis held seats at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and was a personal friend of J.R.R. Tolkien. He is most known for his works of fiction, which include The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and The Space Trilogy.
His work was profoundly influenced by Christianity, prompting him to produce the nonfiction apologetics Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. During the war, Lewis was well-known for his Christian radio programmes, which provided solace to many people.
C.S. Lewis returned to Anglicanism at the age of 32, after forsaking his faith as a child.
His work was profoundly influenced by Christianity, prompting him to produce the nonfiction apologetics Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. During the war, Lewis was well-known for his Christian radio programmes, which provided solace to many people.
Here are the best C.S. Lewis quotations in one spot, whether you know him as a children’s book or find inspiration in his religious writings.
C.S. Lewis Quotes
Do not dare not to dare.
You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.
If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.
We are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.
The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.
Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.
I was with book, as a woman is with child.
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different…
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen – not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.
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.
In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s, we do not accept them easily enough.
Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
We meet no ordinary people in our lives.
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.
The death of a beloved is an amputation.
She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird 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.
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
When you are arguing against God you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.
We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
There would be no sense in saying you trusted Jesus if you would not take his advice.
God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.
But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.
To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?
You can never get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
A woman’s heart should be so close to God that a man should have to chase Him to find her.
What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.
I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.
When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.
The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.
I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.
A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.
All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.
Forgiveness does not mean excusing.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.
God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.
Being in love” first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
It is not your business to succeed, but to do right; when you have done so, the rest lies with God.
I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!
You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.
Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.
The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies, but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.
Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.
For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.
We do not want merely to see beauty… We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with him. He walks everywhere incognito.
All get what they want; they do not always like it.
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.
It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.
If you’re thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you’re embarking on something, which will take the whole of you.
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
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.
It cost God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost him crucifixion.
Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.
He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear.
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
You can make anything by writing.
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…
Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.
Of all the bad men, religious bad men are the worst.
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. You are as much alone with him as if you were the only being he had ever created.
We are what we believe we are.
It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.
Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
If God had granted all the silly prayers I’ve made in my life, where should I be now?.
You must ask for God’s help. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.
Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.
When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you’d been the only man in the world.
To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere.
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.
Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.
Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.
You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
History isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.
Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.
Though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not.
Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you do, and you will presently come to love him.
Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don’t go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don’t try to get there at all. It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
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.
Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be.
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
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.
It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.
Suspicion often creates what it suspects.
If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.
A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.
It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.
There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
Things never happen the same way twice.
Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
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.
Good English’ is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
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.
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.
Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.