Quotes by C.S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis was a novelist, poet, academic, literary critic, lay theologian, and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland. His Christian faith had a profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim. He is known for both his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy and his non-fiction, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. Lewis's works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies. The books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have sold the most and have been popularized on stage, TV, radio, and cinema.

Here are some of his more popular quotes:

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

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

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

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.

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

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.

Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

We are what we believe we are.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

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

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

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

Though our feelings come and go, God’s love for us does not.

Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone you will presently come to love him.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.

What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.

Friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.

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

To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.

We want not so much a Father but a grandfather in heaven, a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?

You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.