C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

To be ignorant and simple now-not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground-would be to throw down our weapons and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

C. S. Lewis
If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.

C. S. Lewis
One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up.

C. S. Lewis
The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose.

C. S. Lewis
Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better...

C. S. Lewis
Isn't it funny the way some combinations of words can give you--almost apart from their meaning--a thrill like music?

C. S. Lewis
If God had granted all the silly prayers I've made in my life, where should I be now?

C. S. Lewis
A great deal of what is being published by writers in the religious tradition is a scandal and is actually turning people away from the church. The liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel are responsible.

C. S. Lewis
The Christian view is that men were created to be in a certain relationship to God (if we are in that relation to Him, the right relation to one another will follow inevitably).

C. S. Lewis
We have not, in fact, proved that science excludes miracles: we have only proved that the question of miracles, like innumerable other questions, excludes laboratory treatment.

C. S. Lewis
Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'.

C. S. Lewis
The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

C. S. Lewis
We sacrifice other species to our own not because our own has any objective metaphysical privilege over others, but simply because it is ours. It may be very natural to have this loyalty to our own species, but let us hear no more from the naturalists about the "sentimentality" of anti-vivisectionists. If loyalty to our own species - preference for man simply because we are men - is not sentiment, then what is?

C. S. Lewis
Sanity... had it ever been more than a convention -- a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?

C. S. Lewis
You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.

C. S. Lewis
Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.

C. S. Lewis
It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good.

C. S. Lewis
No one returns from Christianity to the same state he was before Christianity but into a worse state: the difference between a pagan and an apostate is the difference between an unmarried woman and an adulteress. For faith perfects nature but faith lost corrupts nature. Therefore many men of our time have lost not only the supernatural light but also the natural light which pagans possessed.

C. S. Lewis
If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must think of God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.

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

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

C. S. Lewis
You can't lay down any pattern for God. There are many different ways of bringing people into his Kingdom, even some ways that I specially dislike! I have therefore learned to be cautious in my judgment.

C. S. Lewis
The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.

C. S. Lewis
Of course it should be pointed out that, though all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that he cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted him in this life.

C. S. Lewis
I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous.

C. S. Lewis
Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult.

C. S. Lewis
God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all...

C. S. Lewis
The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.

C. S. Lewis
'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.

C. S. Lewis
Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.

C. S. Lewis