Top 500 C. S. Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.”

— C. S. Lewis

252. “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.”

— C. S. Lewis

253. “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”

— C. S. Lewis

254. “If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.”

— C. S. Lewis

255. “In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.”

— C. S. Lewis

256. “I pray because I can’t help myself...”

— C. S. Lewis

257. “Aslan’s instructions always work; there are no exceptions.”

— C. S. Lewis

258. “There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

— C. S. Lewis

259. “Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier could give some advice.”

— C. S. Lewis

260. “When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.”

— C. S. Lewis

261. “Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.”

— C. S. Lewis

262. “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

263. “I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”

— C. S. Lewis

264. “Anger is the fluid love bleeds when cut.”

— C. S. Lewis

265. “When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.”

— C. S. Lewis

266. “God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.”

— C. S. Lewis

267. “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

268. “If we only have the will to walk, then God is pleased with our stumbles.”

— C. S. Lewis

269. “The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time – for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.”

— C. S. Lewis

270. “Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.”

— C. S. Lewis

271. “But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.”

— C. S. Lewis

272. “Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.”

— C. S. Lewis

273. “The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.”

— C. S. Lewis

274. “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

275. “Above all else, the devil can not stand to be mocked.”

— C. S. Lewis

276. “You do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but you have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”

— C. S. Lewis

277. “The Glory of God, and, as our only means of glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life.”

— C. S. Lewis

278. “Nothing is really ours until we share it.”

— C. S. Lewis

279. “Because God created the Natural – invented it out of His love and artistry – it demands our reverence.”

— C. S. Lewis

280. “Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

— C. S. Lewis

281. “When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.”

— C. S. Lewis

282. “One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realize your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.”

— C. S. Lewis

283. “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”

— C. S. Lewis

284. “Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.”

— C. S. Lewis

285. “The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.”

— C. S. Lewis

286. “You Too? I thought I was the only one.”

— C. S. Lewis

287. “We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. 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

288. “Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time.”

— C. S. Lewis

289. “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

290. “Imagine yourself as a living house.”

— C. S. Lewis

291. “First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”

— C. S. Lewis

292. “I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.”

— C. S. Lewis

293. “Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.”

— C. S. Lewis

294. “Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.”

— C. S. Lewis

295. “Thirst was made for water. Inquiry for truth.”

— C. S. Lewis

296. “We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.”

— C. S. Lewis

297. “You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.”

— C. S. Lewis

298. “One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.”

— C. S. Lewis

299. “The true Christian’s nostril is to be continually attentive to the inner cesspool.”

— C. S. Lewis

300. “I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell; and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.”

— C. S. Lewis