Clive Staples Lewis was a British writer and lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Oxford University (Magdalen College) and Cambridge University (Magdalene College). He is best known for his works of fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.
Lewis’s faith profoundly affected his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim. Lewis wrote more than 30 books which have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies. The books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have sold the most and have been popularized on stage, TV, radio, and cinema. His philosophical writings are widely cited by Christian apologists from many denominations.
Some of the best quotes from C. S. Lewis are listed below.
- “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” – C. S. Lewis
- “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.” – C. S. Lewis
- “A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.” – C. S. Lewis
- “A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.” – C. S. Lewis
- “A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.” – C. S. Lewis
- “A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” – C. S. Lewis
- “All get what they want; they do not always like it.” – C. S. Lewis
- “All these toys were never intended to possess my heart. My true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.” – C. S. Lewis
- “And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly 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
- “As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…” – C. S. Lewis
- “Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together. If the voice within us does not say this it is not the voice of Eros.” – C. S. Lewis
- “But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Crying is all right in its own way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Die before you die, there is no chance after.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Do not dare not to dare.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.” – C. S. Lewis
- “For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Forgiveness does not mean excusing.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.” – C. S. Lewis
- “God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.” – C. S. Lewis
- “God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.” – 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
- “God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. You are as much alone with him as if you were the only being he had ever created.” – C. S. Lewis
- “God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.” – C. S. Lewis
- “God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.” – C. S. Lewis
- “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” – C. S. Lewis
- “God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Good English’ is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.” – 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
- “He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.” – C. S. Lewis
- “History isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.” – C. S. Lewis
- “How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.” – C. S. Lewis
- “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” – 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
- “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” – C. S. Lewis
- “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” – C. S. Lewis
- “I gave in, and admitted that God was God.” – C. S. Lewis
- “I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.” – C. S. Lewis
- “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?” – C. S. Lewis
- “I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.” – C. S. Lewis
- “I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that?” – C. S. Lewis
- “I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.” – C. S. Lewis
- “If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.” – C. S. Lewis
- “If God forgives us we must forgive, ourselves otherwise it’s like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.” – C. S. Lewis
- “If God had granted all the silly prayers I’ve made in my life, where should I be now?” – C. S. Lewis
- “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.” – C. S. Lewis
- “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” – C. S. Lewis
- “If you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.” – C. S. Lewis
- “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” – C. S. Lewis
- “If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” – C. S. Lewis
- “If you’re thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you’re embarking on something, which will take the whole of you.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” – C. S. Lewis
- “In friendship… we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another… the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting – any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.” – C. S. Lewis
- “In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all. ” – C. S. Lewis
- “In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s, we do not accept them easily enough.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different…” – C. S. Lewis
- “It cost God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost him crucifixion.” – C. S. Lewis
- “It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” – C. S. Lewis
- “It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.” – C. S. Lewis
- “It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.” – C. S. Lewis
- “It is not your business to succeed but to do right. When you have done so the rest lies with God.” – C. S. Lewis
- “It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.” – C. S. Lewis
- “It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.” – C. S. Lewis
- “It was when I was happiest that I longed most… The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing… to find the place where all the beauty came from.” – C. S. Lewis
- “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” – C. S. Lewis
- “It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Joy is the serious business of Heaven.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.” – C. S. Lewis
- “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” – C. S. Lewis
- “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” – C. S. Lewis
- “No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights.” – C. S. Lewis
- “No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.” – C. S. Lewis
- “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” – C. S. Lewis
- “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Now we cannot… discover our failure to keep God’s law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this. I can’t.” – C. S. Lewis”
- “Of all the bad men, religious bad men are the worst.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!” – C. S. Lewis
- “Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.” – C. S. Lewis
- “One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.” – C. S. Lewis
- “One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” – 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
- “Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies–these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can’t see it. So quietly submit to be painted – i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone. You are in the right way. Walk – don’t keep on looking at it.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.” – C. S. Lewis
- “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.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The stamp of the Saint is that he can waive his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions – to Christ.” – C. S. Lewis
- “The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.” – C. S. Lewis
- “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” – C. S. Lewis
- “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously – no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.” – C. S. Lewis
- “There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way’. All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened. ” – C. S. Lewis
- “There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” – C. S. Lewis
- “There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.” – C. S. Lewis
- “There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.” – C. S. Lewis
- “There would be no sense in saying you trusted Jesus if you would not take his advice.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.” – C. S. Lewis
- “This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.” – C. S. Lewis
- “Though our feelings come and go, God’s love for us does not.” – C. S. Lewis
- “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.” – C. S. Lewis
- “To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.” – C. S. Lewis
- “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” – C. S. Lewis
- “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” – C. S. Lewis
- “To walk out of his will is to walk into nowhere.” – C. S. Lewis
- “To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?” – C. S. Lewis
- “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We are what we believe we are.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We do not want merely to see beauty… We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies, but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We want not so much a Father but a grandfather in heaven, a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?” – C. S. Lewis
- “We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.” – C. S. Lewis
- “We’re not doubting that God will do the best for us; we’re wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.” – C. S. Lewis
- “What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.” – C. S. Lewis
- “What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.” – C. S. Lewis
- “When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you’d been the only man in the world.” – C. S. Lewis
- “When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.” – C. S. Lewis
- “When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.” – C. S. Lewis
- “When you are arguing against God you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.” – C. S. Lewis
- “When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.” – C. S. Lewis
- “With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.” – C. S. Lewis
- “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” – C. S. Lewis
- “You can make anything by writing.” – C. S. Lewis
- “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C. S. Lewis
- “You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C. S. Lewis
- “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” – C. S. Lewis
- “You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.” – C. S. Lewis
- “You must ask for God’s help. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.” – C. S. Lewis
- “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.” – C. S. Lewis