Top 10 Most Famous C. S. Lewis Quotes
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
— C. S. Lewis
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
— C. S. Lewis
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
— C. S. Lewis
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
— C. S. Lewis
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
— C. S. Lewis
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.’
— C. S. Lewis
14 C.S. Lewis Quotes on Faith and Hope
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
— C. S. Lewis
Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.
— C. S. Lewis
Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.
— C. S. Lewis
A woman’s heart should be so close to God that a man should have to chase Him to find her.
— C. S. Lewis
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
— C. S. Lewis
God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.
— C. S. Lewis
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
When Christ died, he died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only person in the world.
— C. S. Lewis
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
— C. S. Lewis
Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.
— C. S. Lewis
No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.
— C. S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis Quotes about Heaven, Integrity and God (LOVE)
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
— C. S. Lewis
If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.
— C. S. Lewis
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
— C. S. Lewis
The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not.
— C. S. Lewis
You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.
— C. S. Lewis
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
— C. S. Lewis
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you do, and you will presently come to love him.
— C. S. Lewis
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
— C. S. Lewis
There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.
— C. S. Lewis
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.
— C. S. Lewis
Don’t shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you others can see Him.
— C. S. Lewis
It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.
— C. S. Lewis
Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.
— C. S. Lewis
Friendship… is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…”
— C. S. Lewis
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
— C. S. Lewis
What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.
— C. S. Lewis
It is not your business to succeed, but to do right; when you have done so, the rest lies with God.
— C. S. Lewis
One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.
— C. S. Lewis
In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s, we do not accept them easily enough.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.
— C. S. Lewis
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
— C. S. Lewis
There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
— C. S. Lewis
Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
— C. S. Lewis
Joy is the serious business of heaven.
— C. S. Lewis
Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
— C. S. Lewis
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
— C. S. Lewis
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
— C. S. Lewis
God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
— C. S. Lewis
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also harder to bear.
— C. S. Lewis
The Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
— C. S. Lewis
When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.
— C. S. Lewis
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
— C. S. Lewis
Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.
— C. S. Lewis
The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.
— C. S. Lewis
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.
— C. S. Lewis
The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
— C. S. Lewis
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
— C. S. Lewis
There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.
— C. S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis Quotes about Life and Reading
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
— C. S. Lewis
I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
— C. S. Lewis
Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.
— C. S. Lewis
A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.
— C. S. Lewis
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
— C. S. Lewis
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us… While what we call ‘our own life’ remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make ‘our own life’ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?
— C. S. Lewis
69 More Best C.S. Lewis Quotes
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
— C. S. Lewis
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
— C. S. Lewis
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
— C. S. Lewis
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
— C. S. Lewis
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
— C. S. Lewis
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
— C. S. Lewis
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.
— C. S. Lewis
Nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.
— C. S. Lewis
A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
— C. S. Lewis
Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
— C. S. Lewis
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
— C. S. Lewis
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
— C. S. Lewis
You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
— C. S. Lewis
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ.
— C. S. Lewis
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
— C. S. Lewis
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
— C. S. Lewis
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
— C. S. Lewis
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
— C. S. Lewis
The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— 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
Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
— C. S. Lewis
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
— C. S. Lewis
What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
— C. S. Lewis
We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.
— C. S. Lewis
It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
— C. S. Lewis
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
— C. S. Lewis
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
— C. S. Lewis
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
— C. S. Lewis
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.’
— C. S. Lewis
We are what we believe we are.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you’d been the only man in the world.
— C. S. Lewis
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
— C. S. Lewis
‘The Lion’ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’
— C. S. Lewis
What I call my ‘self’ now is hardly a person at all. It’s mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.
— C. S. Lewis
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
— C. S. Lewis
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
— C. S. Lewis
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
— C. S. Lewis
Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.
— C. S. Lewis
Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
— C. S. Lewis
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.
— C. S. Lewis
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
— C. S. Lewis
Writing is like a ‘lust,’ or like ‘scratching when you itch.’ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.
— C. S. Lewis
Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.
— C. S. Lewis
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
— C. S. Lewis
I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.
— C. S. Lewis
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
— C. S. Lewis
‘Good English’ is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.
— C. S. Lewis
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
— C. S. Lewis
If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
— C. S. Lewis
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
— C. S. Lewis
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
— C. S. Lewis
Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.
— C. S. Lewis
