C. S. Lewis Quotes

Christianity if false is not important. If Christianity is true however it is of infinite importance. What it cannot be is moderately important.

~ C. S. Lewis

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it but because I see everything by it.

~ C. S. Lewis

Not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point which means at the point of highest reality.

~ 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

Unsatisfied desire is in itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.

~ 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

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope soft underfoot without sudden turnings without milestones without signposts.

~ C. S. Lewis

A woman means by unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others a man means not giving trouble to others. Thus each sex regards the other as basically selfish.

~ C. S. Lewis

Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

~ C. S. Lewis

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

~ C. S. Lewis

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

~ 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

What I call my 'self' now is hardly a person at all. It's mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.

~ C. S. Lewis

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

~ 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

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

~ C. S. Lewis

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

~ C. S. Lewis

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us... While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

~ 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

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

~ C. S. Lewis

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

~ 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

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

~ 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

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

~ 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

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

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.'

~ C. S. Lewis

There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.

~ C. S. Lewis

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

~ C. S. Lewis

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

~ C. S. Lewis

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.

~ C. S. Lewis

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.

~ C. S. Lewis

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

~ 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

Eros will have naked bodies Friendship naked personalities.

~ C. S. Lewis

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

~ C. S. Lewis

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

~ C. S. Lewis