Top 500 C. S. Lewis Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Love as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit...”

— C. S. Lewis

352. “The present is the only time in which any duty may be done or grace received.”

— C. S. Lewis

353. “Virtue – even attempted virtue – brings light; indulgence brings fog.”

— C. S. Lewis

354. “A man whose life has been transformed by Christ cannot help but have his worldview show through.”

— C. S. Lewis

355. “Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.”

— C. S. Lewis

356. “Selfishness has never been admired.”

— C. S. Lewis

357. “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.”

— C. S. Lewis

358. “I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.”

— C. S. Lewis

359. “Mercy detached from justice grows unmerciful.”

— C. S. Lewis

360. “To walk out of his will is to walk into nowhere.”

— C. S. Lewis

361. “Let’s pray that the human race never escapes Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.”

— C. S. Lewis

362. “A Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent.”

— C. S. Lewis

363. “Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”

— C. S. Lewis

364. “I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, of this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.”

— C. S. Lewis

365. “You’ll never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking what sort of impression you make.”

— C. S. Lewis

366. “Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him.”

— C. S. Lewis

367. “I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.”

— C. S. Lewis

368. “Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you’d never know which were which.”

— C. S. Lewis

369. “We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.””

— C. S. Lewis

370. “Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.”

— C. S. Lewis

371. “The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don’t forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.”

— C. S. Lewis

372. “In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.”

— C. S. Lewis

373. “A little lie is like a little pregnancy it doesn’t take long before everyone knows.”

— C. S. Lewis

374. “In your life you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some that you wish you never have to think about again. But you do.”

— C. S. Lewis

375. “Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.”

— C. S. Lewis

376. “To get even near humility, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.”

— C. S. Lewis

377. “In silence and in meditation on the eternal truths, I hear the voice of God which excites our hearts to greater love.”

— C. S. Lewis

378. “Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.”

— C. S. Lewis

379. “And so for a time it looked as if all the adventures were coming to and end; but that was not to be.”

— C. S. Lewis

380. “At the end of things, The Blessed will say, “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.” And the lost will say, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”

— C. S. Lewis

381. “Precisely because we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments.”

— C. S. Lewis

382. “If there ever was a time that nothing existed, then nothing would exist now.”

— C. S. Lewis

383. “Being nice doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you feel good because you know you are gracious enough to forgive and smart enough to realize how distasteful some people can be.”

— C. S. Lewis

384. “It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.”

— C. S. Lewis

385. “It’s not a question of God ‘sending’ us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”

— C. S. Lewis

386. “There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.”

— C. S. Lewis

387. “Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly – are done worst when we try hardest to do them.”

— C. S. Lewis

388. “Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

— C. S. Lewis

389. “Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”

— C. S. Lewis

390. “Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even agony into a glory.”

— C. S. Lewis

391. “No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights.”

— C. S. Lewis

392. “If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not.”

— C. S. Lewis

393. “Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”

— C. S. Lewis

394. “Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.”

— C. S. Lewis

395. “Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like.”

— C. S. Lewis

396. “In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”

— C. S. Lewis

397. “Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

— C. S. Lewis

398. “There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.”

— C. S. Lewis

399. “God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.”

— C. S. Lewis

400. “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.”

— C. S. Lewis