C.S. Lewis was a prolific writer and thinker, and his quotes on various topics are still widely read and appreciated today. His most famous quotes are those on purpose, self, God, education, and the future.
On the subject of purpose, Lewis once said: “The one thing that gets me through life is that I have a definite purpose – and that is to discover it.” This quote speaks to the importance of having a goal in life, no matter what it may be. Even if we don’t know our purpose initially, it’s essential to keep searching for it.
On the topic of self, Lewis said: “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” This quote reminds us that we can always choose to change our endings – no one else can do it for us. We have the power to control our destiny.
In regards to God, Lewis said: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the 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 things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.
Greatest C.S. Lewis Quotes
- “You can make anything by writing.”
“You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.”
“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
“I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
“The death of a beloved is an amputation.”
“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” - “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”
- “Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.”
- “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
- “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.”
- “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
- “It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”
- “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
- “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
- “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
- “Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
- “When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.”
- “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 is gone, pride is gone.”
- “A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
- “The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it — made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”
- “Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
“It was when I was happiest that I longed most…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
Famous C.S. Lewis Quotes
- “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
- “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
- “I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
- “Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say ‘My heart is broken.'”
- “God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.”
- “The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
- “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
- “What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
- “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.”
“Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.” - “We meet no ordinary people in our lives.”
- “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”
- “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
- “Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
- “Things never happen the same way twice.”
- “The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not.”
- “I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.”
- “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…”
- “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
“Courage, dear heart.”
Motivational C.S. Lewis Quotes
- “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
“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.” - “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.”
- “The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
- “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
- “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.”
“He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.” - “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”
- “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” - “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”
- “Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
- “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?”
- “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
“God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.” - “When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.”
- “‘You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,’ said the Lion.”
- “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.”
- “Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.”
- “It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.”
- “If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.”
- “‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver; ‘don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.'”
“Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.” - “Make your choice, adventurous Stranger, Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had.”
- “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, the only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
- “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”
- “‘That’s the worst of girls,’ said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. ‘They never can carry a map in their heads.’
‘That’s because our heads have something inside them,’ said Lucy.” - “It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.”
- “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”
“Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.” - “Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.”
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” - “Since it is so likely that [children] will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”
- “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
- “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.”
“The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be…It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.” - “‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,’ said Aslan. ‘And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.'”
“Do not dare not to dare.” - “We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.”
- “Give up yourself, and you will find your authentic self. Lose your life, and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body. In the end, submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.
- “You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words.”
“But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan.” - “Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.”
- “If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
- “Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can’t see it. So quietly submit to be painted—i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone. You are in the right way. Walk— don’t keep on looking at it.”
- “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”
- “I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.”
- “God will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist’s shop.”
- “And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
- “Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.”
- “Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more, When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death, And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.”
- “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”
- “Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”
- “Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.”
- “I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. …I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.”
- “‘Child,’ said the Lion, ‘I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.'”
- “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird 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.”
- “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.”
- “There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.”
- “Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?”
- “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
- “What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”
- “Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to avow them and half doubtful if they can after all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in half an hour – in ten minutes – these same views and standards become once more indisputable. The opinion of this little circle, while I am in it, outweighs that of a thousand outsiders: as Friendship strengthens, it will do this even when my Friends are far away. For we all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men ‘after our own heart.’ Only they really know our mind and only they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread.”
- “The condition of having Friends is that we should want something besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question “Do you see the same truth?” would be “I see nothing, and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,” no Friendship can arise – though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.”
- “In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together; each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others.”
- “Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.”
- “Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”
- “People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.”
- “It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision – it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.”
- “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets… Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves.’ For in this love ‘to divide is not to take away.'”
- “Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and Friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”
- “In Friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends, ‘Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.’ The 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.”
- “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
- “To love at all is to be vulnerable.”
- “Friendship … is born when one man says to another “, What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
These are just a few of the many excellent quotes by c.s. Lewis, that has stuck with me over the years. If you need some inspiration or motivation, be sure to check out some of his other work – you won’t be disappointed!
C.S. Lewis was a thoughtful guy who had a lot to say about various topics, including purpose, self, God, education, the future, books, peace, and integrity.
