CS Lewis

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“‘If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks wither goodness, or power, or both.’ This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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

CS Lewis  |  The Great Divorce

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I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

CS Lewis  |  Is Theology Poetry?

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“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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“This may raise the ridiculous idea that the Fall took God by surprise and upset His plan, or else — more ridiculously still — that God planned the whole thing for conditions which, He well knew, were never going to be realised. In fact, of course, God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

CS Lewis  |  The Weight of Glory

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“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A [mathematical] sum [incorrectly worked] can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and [then] working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound.”

CS Lewis  |  The Great Divorce

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“People are told they ought to love God, but they cannot find any such feelings in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before: Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Look for Christ and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.”

CS Lewis  |  "Mere Christianity"

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“As an organism, man is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey the laws which he shares with other things. But the law which is particular to his human nature, the law he does now share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of earth — the very thing the whole story has been about.”

CS Lewis  |  Allegedly, said in interview

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“But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”

CS Lewis  |  The Four Loves

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“There is someone I love, even though I don’t approve of what he does. There is someone I accept, though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive, though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is me.”

CS Lewis  |  The Essential C.S. Lewis

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“There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else, it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given…

“This consciousness is neither a logical, nor an illogical, inference from the facts of experience; if we did not bring it to our experience we could not find in there. It is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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“When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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“It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them…I empathically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it — that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. I believe, on the contrary, that ‘they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will.'”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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“The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world; but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy.

“It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle in our return to God; a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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“We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about ‘pie in the sky’, and of being told that we are trying to ‘escape’ from the duty of making a happy world here and now into the dreams of a happy world elsewhere. But either there is a ‘pie in the sky’ or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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“Courage is not just one of the virtues, it is the form of every virtue at the testing place.”

CS Lewis  |  The Screwtape Letters

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Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. . . . It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Love is the great conqueror of lust.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Have ye received his image in your countenances?” “Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has. At first, only for moments. Then for longer periods. Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into . . . a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God; which shares His power, joy, knowledge and eternity.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and product what we call miracles, is a part of Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world demands that these occasions should be extremely rare.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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“All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Aim at heaven and you will get the earth thrown in; aim at earth and you will get neither.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman.’ Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).”

CS Lewis  |  The Four Loves

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“We have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing God means to make us.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.”

CS Lewis  |  The Weight of Glory

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No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you do not find out the strength of the German army by fighting it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try and fight it: and Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who know to the full what temptation means – the only complete realist.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.”

CS Lewis  |  The Chronicles of Narnia

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“Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think is trustworthy. 99% of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I cannot prove by abstract reasoning that there is such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the coalition of blood on authority.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers?”

CS Lewis  |  What Christmas Means to Me

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“The relationship between Creator and creature is, of course, unique, and cannot be paralleled by any relations between one creature and another. God is both further from us, and nearer to us, than any other being…He makes, we are made; He is original, we derivative. But at the same time, and for some reason, the intimacy between God and even the meanest creature is closer than any that creatures can attain with one another.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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“Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. 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 a word without meaning.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“A proud man Is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Pride is the complete anti-God state of mind. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say people are proud of being rich or clever or good looking, but they are not. They are proud being richer or cleverer or better looking than others.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect love: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself….Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres. After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of ourselves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.”

CS Lewis  |  Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis

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“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.”

CS Lewis  |  The Four Loves

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“It is clear that this knowledge of his death must have somehow been withdrawn from him before he prayed in Gethsemane. He could not, with whatever reservation about the Father’s will, have prayed that the cup might pass and simultaneously known that it would not. That is both a logical and psychological impossibility. You see what this involves? Lest any trial incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope – of suspense, anxiety- were at the last moment looser upon him – the supposed possibility that, after all, he might, he just conceivably might, be spared from the supreme horror. There was precedent. Isaac had hern spared; he too at the last moment, he also against all apparent possibility. But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and the consequent tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps he would not have been very man. To live in a fully predictable world is not to be man.”

CS Lewis

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“If you are a nice person–if virtue comes easily to you–beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own merits what are really God’s gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service, you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“The difference is that Christianity thinks this dark power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with duelism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war , a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Chrisitanity

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“All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by the words ‘I ought’ or ‘I ought not’…Morality is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be ‘given’ in the facts of experience.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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“Do not think that I am saying anything against science. I am only saying what its job is. If there is something behind, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing are neither of them statements that science can make.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under.”

CS Lewis  |  The Screwtape Letters

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“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

CS Lewis

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“The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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