Top 500 C. S. Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— C. S. Lewis

404. “It’s like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.”

— C. S. Lewis

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “The full acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination.”

— C. S. Lewis

410. “Christianity is a fighting religion.”

— C. S. Lewis

411. “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

412. “The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil’s whole structure away.”

— C. S. Lewis

413. “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.”

— C. S. Lewis

414. “Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.”

— C. S. Lewis

415. “Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.”

— C. S. Lewis

416. “God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them.”

— C. S. Lewis

417. “Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.”

— C. S. Lewis

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

— C. S. Lewis

419. “Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die.”

— C. S. Lewis

420. “He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.”

— C. S. Lewis

421. “There is no use in talking as if forgiveness were easy. For we find that the work of forgiveness has to be done over and over again.”

— C. S. Lewis

422. “The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.”

— C. S. Lewis

423. “Narnia! It’s all in the wardrobe just like I told you!”

— C. S. Lewis

424. “The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.”

— C. S. Lewis

425. “We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.”

— C. S. Lewis

426. “Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will ’turn the necessity to glorious gain.”

— C. S. Lewis

427. “This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there’s a rumor going around the shop that some of us are someday going to come to life.”

— C. S. Lewis

428. “It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”

— C. S. Lewis

429. “Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.”

— C. S. Lewis

430. “The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose.”

— C. S. Lewis

431. “If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, ‘I am.’ To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him.”

— C. S. Lewis

432. “A promise must be about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling a certain way.”

— C. S. Lewis

433. “Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan.”

— C. S. Lewis

434. “Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary.”

— C. S. Lewis

435. “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”

— C. S. Lewis

436. “If crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime and compulsorily cured.”

— C. S. Lewis

437. “A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.”

— C. S. Lewis

438. “Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I’m not sure that old age isn’t the best part of life.”

— C. S. Lewis

439. “Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one.”

— C. S. Lewis

440. “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

— C. S. Lewis

441. “Badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.”

— C. S. Lewis

442. “Unsatisfied desire is in itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”

— C. S. Lewis

443. “Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.”

— C. S. Lewis

444. “A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.”

— C. S. Lewis

445. “Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”

— C. S. Lewis

446. “It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.”

— C. S. Lewis

447. “People talk as if grief were just a feeling – as if it weren’t the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.”

— C. S. Lewis

448. “The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”

— C. S. Lewis

449. “We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men – things at once rational and animal.”

— C. S. Lewis

450. “This is the land of Narnia,? said the Faun, ’where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea.”

— C. S. Lewis