170+ EXCLUSIVE C. S. Lewis Quotes To Make You Wiser

Clive Staples Lewis was a British writer and lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Oxford University and Cambridge University. He is best known for his children’s classic series The Chronicles of Narnia, and his Christian apologetic novel The Screwtape Letters. The best and most powerful C.S. Lewis quotes will enrich your life, and remind you some things about kindness and honesty.

If you’re searching for powerful life quotes of all time that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of best Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes, inspirational Edgar Allan Poe quotes, and holy quotes from Mother Teresa.

C. S. Lewis Quotes

True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. – C. S. Lewis

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. – C. S. Lewis

We are what we believe we are. – 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

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither. – C. S. Lewis

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. – C. S. Lewis

You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. – 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 whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. – C. S. Lewis

Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose. – C. S. Lewis

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching. – 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

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. – 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

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. – 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

Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror. – C. S. Lewis

Crying is all right in its 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

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

Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. – C. S. Lewis

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

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. – C. S. Lewis

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. – C. S. Lewis

The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God. – 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

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival. – C. S. Lewis

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind. – 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

What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it. – C. S. Lewis

Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less. – C. S. Lewis

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. – C. S. Lewis

No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice. – C. S. Lewis

Best C. S. Lewis Quotes About Love, God, and Life

• Of all the bad men, religious bad men are the worst. – C. S. Lewis
• Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose. – C. S. Lewis
• All get what they want; they do not always like it. – 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
• 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
• I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more. – C. S. Lewis
• Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also harder to bear. – 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
• The Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. – 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
• 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
• When you are arguing against God you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all. – C. S. Lewis
• You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
• 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
• 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
• It is not your business to succeed, but to do right; when you have done so, the rest lies with God. – 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
• Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . . – 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
• Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words. – 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
• 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
• 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 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
• 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
• 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
• A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered. – 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
• Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good. – 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
• Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. – 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
• If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity. – C. S. Lewis

Inspiring C. S. Lewis Quotes on Success, Happiness and New Beginning

• 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
• Forgiveness does not mean excusing. – C. S. Lewis
• I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been – if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again. – C. S. Lewis
• 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 heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it. – C. S. Lewis
• When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place. – C. S. Lewis
• There would be no sense in saying you trusted Jesus if you would not take his advice. – C. S. Lewis
• Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. – 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
• God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. – 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
• I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once. – 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
• 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
• 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
• Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. – C. S. Lewis
• The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. – C. S. Lewis
• I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather – C. S. Lewis
• To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. – 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
• 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
• Though our feelings come and go, his love for us does not. – C. S. Lewis
• You must ask for God’s help. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. – C. S. Lewis
• We are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. – 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
• Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods. – C. S. Lewis
• If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed. – 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
• 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
• One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness. – C. S. Lewis
• The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last. – C. S. Lewis
• I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. – 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
• If God had granted all the silly prayers I’ve made in my life, where should I be now? – C. S. Lewis
• Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different… – C. S. Lewis
• You can make anything by writing. – C. S. Lewis
• The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. – 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
• No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. – 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

Top C.S. Lewis quotes About Friendship, Heaven and Serving Others

• 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
• 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
• 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 future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. – 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
• I sometimes wonder if all pleasures are not substitutes for joy. – C. S. Lewis
• Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive. – C. S. Lewis
• Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world. – C. S. Lewis
• To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere. – C. S. Lewis
• Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you. – C. S. Lewis
• You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you, said the Lion. – C. S. Lewis
• Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. – 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
• I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in! – C. S. Lewis
• Being in love first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. – C. S. Lewis
• Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. – C. S. Lewis
• Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done. – 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
• Reality is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. – C. S. Lewis
• We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. – C. S. Lewis
• Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair. – 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
• Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises but keep them. – 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Joy is the serious business of Heaven. – 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
• 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
• The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal. – C. S. Lewis
• Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. – 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
• You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God. – C. S. Lewis
• The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal. – 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
• No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. – C. S. Lewis
• Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny. – 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
• When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world. – 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
• 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

Famous Quotes by C.S. Lewis on Humility, Christianity and Prayer

• Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. – 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
• With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere. – C. S. Lewis
• I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. – 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
• Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success. – C. S. Lewis
• The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not. – C. S. Lewis
• It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one. – C. S. Lewis
• How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete. – 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael. – 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
• Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. – C. S. Lewis
• How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete. – 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
• Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. – C. S. Lewis
• I gave in and admitted that God was God. – C. S. Lewis
• We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ. – 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
• A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. – C. S. Lewis
• Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere. – 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
• 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
• Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature. – C. S. Lewis
• Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart. – C. S. Lewis
• Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony. – C. S. Lewis
• There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. – 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
• 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
• 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
• Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities. – 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