C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness.

C. S. Lewis
Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

C. S. Lewis
No man who says, 'I'm as good as you,' believes it. He would not say it if he did.

C. S. Lewis
Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to 'cure' it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers.

C. S. Lewis
If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it's not so bad.

C. S. Lewis
Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next.

C. S. Lewis
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.

C. S. Lewis
Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want

C. S. Lewis
Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head, but don't be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud, one is safe from the worst form of pride.

C. S. Lewis
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

C. S. Lewis
Precisely because we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments.

C. S. Lewis
The Christian has a great advantage over other men, not by being less fallen than they, nor less doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that he is a fallen man in a fallen world.

C. S. Lewis
We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.

C. S. Lewis
That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.

C. S. Lewis
We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.

C. S. Lewis
We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.

C. S. Lewis
Well!' said Puddleglum, rubbing his hands. 'This is just what I needed. If these chaps don't teach me to take a serious view of life, I don't know what will.

C. S. Lewis
God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.

C. S. Lewis
By gum,' said Digory, 'Don't I just wish I was big enough to punch your head!

C. S. Lewis
And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back—if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?

C. S. Lewis
When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other — the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow — is a prosaic barbarian. But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.

C. S. Lewis
I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse... Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil.

C. S. Lewis
The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.

C. S. Lewis
Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.

C. S. Lewis
There is a difference between a private devotional life and a corporate one. Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa.

C. S. Lewis