C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

God can show Himself as He really is only to real men. And that means not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like; like players in one band, or organs in one body.

C. S. Lewis
The old field of space, time, matter, and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not.

C. S. Lewis
No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought..

C. S. Lewis
Because we love something else more than this world, we love even this world more than those who know no other.

C. S. Lewis
The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly nothing.

C. S. Lewis
If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

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

C. S. Lewis
A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed.

C. S. Lewis
Be good, sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can.

C. S. Lewis
Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.

C. S. Lewis
God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him.

C. S. Lewis
The most deeply compelled action is also the freest action. By that I mean, no part of you is outside the action.

C. S. Lewis
Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.

C. S. Lewis
We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other.

C. S. Lewis
I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.

C. S. Lewis
Christ says, 'Give me all. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You.'

C. S. Lewis
Many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and... God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again

C. S. Lewis
At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget[...]that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.

C. S. Lewis
I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.

C. S. Lewis
A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon.

C. S. Lewis
Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists.

C. S. Lewis
The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.

C. S. Lewis
A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live; a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go: to stay here is death.

C. S. Lewis
Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.

C. S. Lewis
We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way (there is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.

C. S. Lewis
Don't worry. If you really want to, you will Whether you'll like it when you do is another question.

C. S. Lewis
But if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, 'Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.

C. S. Lewis
Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.

C. S. Lewis
Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for "down here" is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment's rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

C. S. Lewis