C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

If I had really cared as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came- I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me, now it matters and I find I didn't.

C. S. Lewis
I'd sooner live among people who don't cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards.

C. S. Lewis
The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.

C. S. Lewis
An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.

C. S. Lewis
Because God created the Natural - invented it out of His love and artistry - it demands our reverence.

C. S. Lewis
Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.

C. S. Lewis
The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don't.

C. S. Lewis
We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

C. S. Lewis
A man can't be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam.

C. S. Lewis
We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.

C. S. Lewis
A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

C. S. Lewis
I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life's short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily

C. S. Lewis
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.

C. S. Lewis
Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease?

C. S. Lewis
What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.

C. S. Lewis
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.

C. S. Lewis
You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.

C. S. Lewis
Gratitude exclaims, very properly, 'How good of God to give me this.'

C. S. Lewis
It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.

C. S. Lewis
If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons' schools, the history of education would be very different.

C. S. Lewis
There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was 'the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.'

C. S. Lewis
I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't.

C. S. Lewis
What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.

C. S. Lewis
The best fruits are plucked for each by some hand that is not his own.

C. S. Lewis
If we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.

C. S. Lewis
The true Christian's nostril is to be continually attentive to the inner cesspool.

C. S. Lewis
Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places.

C. S. Lewis
Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading

C. S. Lewis
You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost or you wouldn't have come where you now are.

C. S. Lewis
All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.

C. S. Lewis