C. S. Lewis - God Quotes

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

C. S. Lewis
What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.

C. S. Lewis
I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

C. S. Lewis
So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. But suppose God became a man... He could surrender His will, suffer and die, because He was a man...

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
God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him.

C. S. Lewis
I#pray because the need flows out of me all the time-walking and sleeping. It does not change # God - it changes me.

C. S. Lewis
To be ignorant and simple now-not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground-would be to throw down our weapons and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

C. S. Lewis
All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!" Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.

C. S. Lewis
'God' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape.

C. S. Lewis
No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.

C. S. Lewis
The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.

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
You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.

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
A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult to save.

C. S. Lewis
The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God.

C. S. Lewis
Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

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
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
It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.

C. S. Lewis
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask — half our great theological and metaphysical problems — are like that.

C. S. Lewis
I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness; you are not needed there at all. No scope of your talents; only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God.

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 is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.

C. S. Lewis
All that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

C. S. Lewis
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

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
The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though the world might last a hundred years.

C. S. Lewis