C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,151 Sourced Quotes

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

C. S. Lewis
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

C. S. Lewis
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

C. S. Lewis
Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

C. S. Lewis
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.

C. S. Lewis
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next... It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get neither.

C. S. Lewis
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

C. S. Lewis
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

C. S. Lewis
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

C. S. Lewis
It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.

C. S. Lewis
Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don't we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive — who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture — almost the précis — we've made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact.

C. S. Lewis
Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control.

C. S. Lewis
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.

C. S. Lewis
The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.

C. S. Lewis
There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.

C. S. Lewis
Kids like us don't often have the chance of meeting a great warrior like you. Would you have a little fencing match with me? It would be frightfully decent.

C. S. Lewis
In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere — "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

C. S. Lewis
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

C. S. Lewis
Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? WEll, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments)...

C. S. Lewis
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

C. S. Lewis
No more I do, your Majesty. But what's that got to do with it? I might as well die on a wild goose chase as die here.

C. S. Lewis
I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had.

C. S. Lewis
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another 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
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
Though under earth, and throneless now I be Yet while I lived all earth was under me.

C. S. Lewis
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
Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.

C. S. Lewis
The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson: 'Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.'

C. S. Lewis
"Aslan" said Lucy "you're bigger". "That is because you are older, little one" answered he. "Not because you are?" "I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger".

C. S. Lewis