C. S. Lewis Quotes

1,147 Sourced Quotes

We have trained them [men] to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

C. S. Lewis
Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, on their view, exist...

C. S. Lewis
We follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus-not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in his eyes than in ours.

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
Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy.

C. S. Lewis
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C. S. Lewis
Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of lucifer.... An instrument strung, but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician

C. S. Lewis
I cannot speak for the way God deals with others; I only know how he deals with me personally.

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
Edmund, who was becoming a nastier person every minute, thought that he had scored a great success, and went on at once to say, 'There she goes again. What's the matter with her?

C. S. Lewis
Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.

C. S. Lewis
He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

C. S. Lewis
When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.

C. S. Lewis
Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

C. S. Lewis
Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.

C. S. Lewis
For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.

C. S. Lewis
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.

C. S. Lewis
What can you ever really know of other people's souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know and this is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books.

C. S. Lewis
The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.

C. S. Lewis
The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

C. S. Lewis