Top 500 C. S. Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.”

— C. S. Lewis

352. “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

353. “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

354. “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”

— C. S. Lewis

355. “Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress.”

— C. S. Lewis

356. “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

357. “The continual looking forward to the eternal world is not a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.”

— C. S. Lewis

358. “I don’t pray so that I can change God. I pray so that God can change me.”

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

360. “You can’t get second things by putting them first. You get second things only by putting first things first.”

— C. S. Lewis

361. “Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.”

— C. S. Lewis

362. “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

363. “Remember He is the artist and you are the picture. You can’t see it, you can’t see your true self. So quietly submit to be painted.”

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

366. “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

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

— C. S. Lewis

368. “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

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

— C. S. Lewis

370. “Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”

— C. S. Lewis

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— C. S. Lewis

375. “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

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

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

379. “Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.”

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

381. “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

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

— C. S. Lewis

383. “On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him.”

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

385. “The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.”

— C. S. Lewis

386. “The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions – to Christ.”

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

389. “In your world, I have another name. You should know me by it.”

— C. S. Lewis

390. “The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.”

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

392. “The man in Christ rose again, not only the God.”

— C. S. Lewis

393. “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

394. “Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.”

— C. S. Lewis

395. “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

396. “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

397. “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”

— C. S. Lewis

398. “With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”

— C. S. Lewis

399. “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

400. “God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.”

— C. S. Lewis