Top 500 C. S. Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not.”

— C. S. Lewis

452. “I came alive when I started loving you.”

— C. S. Lewis

453. “You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.”

— C. S. Lewis

454. “To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?”

— C. S. Lewis

455. “We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.”

— C. S. Lewis

456. “With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.”

— C. S. Lewis

457. “Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.”

— C. S. Lewis

458. “They Open A Door And Enter A World.”

— C. S. Lewis

459. “It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been “had for a sucker” by any number of imposters but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need.”

— C. S. Lewis

460. “All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.”

— C. S. Lewis

461. “For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”

— C. S. Lewis

462. “An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.”

— C. S. Lewis

463. “Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man’s functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.”

— C. S. Lewis

464. “The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.”

— C. S. Lewis

465. “The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other...”

— C. S. Lewis

466. “The Christian “doctrines” are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.”

— C. S. Lewis

467. “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.”

— C. S. Lewis

468. “It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.”

— C. S. Lewis

469. “Every poet and musician and artist, but for grace, is drawn away from love of the things he tells to love of the telling...”

— C. S. Lewis

470. “The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”

— C. S. Lewis

471. “The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.”

— C. S. Lewis

472. “The Christians say that God has done miracles. The modern world, even when it believes in God, and even when it has see the defenselessness of nature, does not. It thinks God would not do that sort of thing.”

— C. S. Lewis

473. “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

— C. S. Lewis

474. “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

475. “Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us – an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof ‘God did it’ and ‘I did it’ are both true descriptions.”

— C. S. Lewis

476. “The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you.”

— C. S. Lewis

477. “The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.”

— C. S. Lewis

478. “And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back – if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?”

— C. S. Lewis

479. “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.”

— C. S. Lewis

480. “Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”

— C. S. Lewis

481. “Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people.”

— C. S. Lewis

482. “Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said.”

— C. S. Lewis

483. “This was bad grammar of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia – in our world they usually don’t talk at all. – The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.”

— C. S. Lewis

484. “Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life.”

— C. S. Lewis

485. “Giving to the poor is an essential part of Christian morality.”

— C. S. Lewis

486. “If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination.”

— C. S. Lewis

487. “But all night, Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes.”

— C. S. Lewis

488. “If I had really cared as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came- I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me, now it matters and I find I didn’t.”

— C. S. Lewis

489. “How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?”

— C. S. Lewis

490. “A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating.”

— C. S. Lewis

491. “We have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.”

— C. S. Lewis

492. “A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.”

— C. S. Lewis

493. “Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”

— C. S. Lewis

494. “You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.”

— C. S. Lewis

495. “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”

— C. S. Lewis

496. “If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.”

— C. S. Lewis

497. “A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.”

— C. S. Lewis

498. “If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means that you are very conceited indeed.”

— C. S. Lewis

499. “Please will you do my job for me.”

— C. S. Lewis

500. “You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly; while you are making them you cannot see them. Good people know about both bad and evil; bad people do not know about either.”

— C. S. Lewis