This collection of over 200 C.S. Lewis quotes contains words to inspire and encourage you in your own life journey.
The British writer C.S. Lewis is best known for his children’s fantasy books, which collectively are known as The Chronicles of Narnia. He was also a prolific writer of essays and letters on a wide range of topics (Christianity being a major one), and his work continues to be widely read.
As a result, C.S. Lewis is one of the most quoted authors of our time, and his words have been used to encourage, inspire, and comfort people from all walks of life.
Quotes C.S. Lewis
Here are some of the best C.S. Lewis quotes:
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
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
– C.S. Lewis
Related: God Quotes
The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not.
– C.S. Lewis
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
– C.S. Lewis
I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. …I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.
– 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
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
To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.
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CS Lewis Quote from Letters to Malcom on Prayer- Rely on GodRelying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done
– 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
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
– 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 Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
– 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
Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.
– C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis Inspirational Quotes
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
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
– 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
To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?
– C.S. Lewis
Related: Finding Yourself Quotes
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
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
Reality is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.
– C.S. Lewis
The stamp of the Saint is that he can waive his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus.
– C.S. Lewis
Though our feelings come and go, his love for us does not.
– C.S. Lewis
The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
– 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
One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.
– 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
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
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
Forgiveness does not mean excusing
– C.S. Lewis
Quotes by 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
I sometimes wonder if all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
– C.S. Lewis
Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.
– 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
God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.
– 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
When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.
– 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
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
What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.
– 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
If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.
– 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
The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.
– 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
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.
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Best C.S. Lewis Quotes
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
Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
– 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
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you do, and you will presently come to love him.
– C.S. Lewis
Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.
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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
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
If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.
– 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
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
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
– C.S. Lewis
To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere.
– C.S. Lewis
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, Thy will be done, and those to whom God says, in the end, Thy will be done. 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
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
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
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
C.S. Lewis Quotes on Life
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
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
– C.S. Lewis
We are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.
– C.S. Lewis
All get what they want; they do not always like it.
– C.S. Lewis
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different…
– 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
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
The-Best-100-CS-Lewis-QuotesIf 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
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
Die before you die, there is no chance after.
– 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
A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.
– C.S. Lewis
Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.
– C.S. Lewis
To love at all is to be vulnerable
– 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
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.
– C.S. Lewis
Quotes from 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,…Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.
– 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
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
Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.
– C.S. Lewis
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
– C.S. Lewis
Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.
– C.S. Lewis
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
– 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
There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
– 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
Final Quotes:
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” ― 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
t is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed. – 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
“Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” The Joyful Christian
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also harder to bear.
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
“If God had granted all the silly prayers I’ve made in my life, where should I be now?”
Related: 300+ Courage Quotes To Help You Face Fears And Overcome Adversity
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