C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

In a civilization like ours, I feel that everyone has to come to terms with the claims of Jesus Christ upon his life, or else be guilty of inattention or of evading the question.

C. S. Lewis
When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.

C. S. Lewis
When we are lost in the woods, the sight of a signpost is a great matter.

C. S. Lewis
That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top, and then it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down.

C. S. Lewis
The right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge.

C. S. Lewis
Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us - an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof 'God did it' and 'I did it' are both true descriptions.

C. S. Lewis
Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.

C. S. Lewis
What we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. In the main I loved you for my own sake: because I needed you...We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly.

C. S. Lewis
We must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste.

C. S. Lewis
The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became man.

C. S. Lewis
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the old Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with completely faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence."

C. S. Lewis
We have discovered that the scheme of 'outlawing war' has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant.

C. S. Lewis
Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly.

C. S. Lewis
A sign of a culture that has lost its faith - Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.

C. S. Lewis
The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt - even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called.

C. S. Lewis
If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighborhood an a natural object. Nature in fact would be for them all that was not "ant-made." Just so, for us, nature is all that is not man-made; the natural state of anything is its state when not modified by man.

C. S. Lewis
We shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.

C. S. Lewis
The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.

C. S. Lewis
Post-Christian man is not the same as Pre-Christian man. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-be and a spouse lost.

C. S. Lewis
The only thing one can usually change in one's situation is oneself. And yet one can't change that either-only ask Our Lord to do so.

C. S. Lewis
Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.

C. S. Lewis
Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might suppose.

C. S. Lewis
Humans are very seldom either totally sincere or totally hypocritical. Their moods change, their motives are mixed, and they are often quite mistaken as to what their motives are.

C. S. Lewis
By repenting, one acknowledges them as sins-therefore not to be repeated.

C. S. Lewis
If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because 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
Love as distinct from being in love is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit...

C. S. Lewis
Could one start a Stagnation Party-which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?

C. S. Lewis
It's not a question of God 'sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.

C. S. Lewis
God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.

C. S. Lewis
All the time the joke is that the word "mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either [Satan] or God will say "mine" of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.

C. S. Lewis