C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.

C. S. Lewis
Though under earth, and throneless now I be Yet while I lived all earth was under me.

C. S. Lewis
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

C. S. Lewis
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

C. S. Lewis
But as long as you know you're nobody special, you'll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another.

C. S. Lewis
In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.

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
For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.

C. S. Lewis
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.

C. S. Lewis
I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc., don't get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking ourselves up each time...The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper and give up.

C. S. Lewis
The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull…

C. S. Lewis
But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

C. S. Lewis
The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory

C. S. Lewis
Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.

C. S. Lewis
Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

C. S. Lewis
And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.

C. S. Lewis
Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

C. S. Lewis
Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger—according to the way you react to it.

C. S. Lewis
Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask.

C. S. Lewis
And there's also 'To him that hath shall be given.' After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.

C. S. Lewis
Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that "suits" him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.

C. S. Lewis
What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.

C. S. Lewis
But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

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
To fight in another man's armour is something more than to be influenced by his style of fighting.

C. S. Lewis
You had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words.

C. S. Lewis
I am sorry that my convictions do not allow me to repeat my friend's offer, said one of the others. But I have had to abandon the humanitarian and egalitarian fancies. His name was Mr. Neo-Classical.

C. S. Lewis
All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning...Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.

C. S. Lewis
They were pretty tired by now of course; but not what I'd call bitterly tired – only slow and feeling very dreamy and tired as one does when one is coming to the end of a long day in the open.

C. S. Lewis
When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.

C. S. Lewis