Top 500 C. S. Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.”

— C. S. Lewis

52. “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

53. “Jesus was either a Liar, a Lunatic, or Lord.”

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

55. “He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.”

— C. S. Lewis

56. “Don’t shine so that others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see HIM.”

— C. S. Lewis

57. “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.”

— C. S. Lewis

58. “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.”

— C. S. Lewis

59. “To love at all is to be vulnerable.”

— C. S. Lewis

60. “You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.”

— C. S. Lewis

61. “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”

— C. S. Lewis

62. “A woman’s heart should be so close to God that a man should have to chase Him to find her.”

— C. S. Lewis

63. “I was not born to be free – I was born to adore and obey.”

— C. S. Lewis

64. “Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.”

— C. S. Lewis

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.”

— C. S. Lewis

69. “Things never happen the same way twice.”

— C. S. Lewis

70. “I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much are what make us perfect.”

— C. S. Lewis

71. “It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.”

— C. S. Lewis

72. “What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.”

— C. S. Lewis

73. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”

— C. S. Lewis

74. “The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.”

— C. S. Lewis

75. “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”

— C. S. Lewis

76. “For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”

— C. S. Lewis

77. “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”

— C. S. Lewis

78. “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

79. “What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”

— C. S. Lewis

80. “Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

— C. S. Lewis

81. “Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don’t agree at all. 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

82. “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird 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

83. “Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”

— C. S. Lewis

84. “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

— C. S. Lewis

85. “You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.”

— C. S. Lewis

86. “Friendship is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”

— C. S. Lewis

87. “Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest upon reciprocity.”

— C. S. Lewis

88. “In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”

— C. S. Lewis

89. “There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.”

— C. S. Lewis

90. “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

91. “Nothing is yet in its true form.”

— C. S. Lewis

92. “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

93. “When things go wrong, you’ll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.”

— C. S. Lewis

94. “Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”

— C. S. Lewis

95. “Suspicion often creates what it suspects.”

— C. S. Lewis

96. “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

97. “The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.”

— C. S. Lewis

98. “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

99. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

— C. S. Lewis

100. “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