C. S. Lewis - God Quotes

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I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love others less.

C. S. Lewis
The Guide sang: The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, And fools crying, Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun! The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run Faster for ever, The old age is done, We have new lights and see without the sun. (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

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
The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

C. S. Lewis
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

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
Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.

C. S. Lewis
God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.

C. S. Lewis
[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.

C. S. Lewis
A perfect practice of Christianity would, of course, consist in a perfect imitation of the life of Christ -- I mean, in so far as it was applicable in one's own particular circumstance. Not in an idiotic sense -- it doesn't mean that every Christian should grow a beard, or be a bachelor, or become a travelling preacher. It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God.

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
That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.

C. S. Lewis
I may repeat 'Do as you would be done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God; and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey him.

C. S. Lewis
If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.

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
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them.

C. S. Lewis
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.

C. S. Lewis
The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.

C. S. Lewis
If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself.

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

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

C. S. Lewis
The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

C. S. Lewis
Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.

C. S. Lewis
Many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and... God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again

C. S. Lewis
'Are the gods not just?'
'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?'

C. S. Lewis
Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory." Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection — if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.

C. S. Lewis
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'

C. S. Lewis
Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want

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