The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a sunhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the son shines on it.
– C.S. Lewis
God
Though our feelings come and go, God’s love for us does not.
– C.S. Lewis
God | Feelings
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
– C.S. Lewis
Christians | Forgiveness
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.
– C.S. Lewis
Atonement
When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.
– C.S. Lewis
Blessings
Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
– C.S. Lewis
Heaven | Joy
The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.
– C.S. Lewis
Happiness
Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose… only (upon) the Beloved who will never pass away.
– C.S. Lewis
Happiness
God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.
– C.S. Lewis
Perseverance | Judging
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
– C.S. Lewis
Life | Goals
Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?
– C.S. Lewis
Eternity
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.
– C.S. Lewis
Christianity
We are what we believe we are.
– C.S. Lewis
Life
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.
– C.S. Lewis
Atheism
A little lie is like a little pregnancy-it doesn’t take long before everyone knows.
– C.S. Lewis
Lying
Now that I am a Christian I do not have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.
– C.S. Lewis
Atheism | Christianity
Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
– C.S. Lewis
Virtue | Power
Love is the great conqueror of lust.
– C.S. Lewis
Love | Lust
Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.
– C.S. Lewis
Christianity | Eternity
You cannot make men good by law.
– C.S. Lewis
Good and Evil | Men
The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God.
– C.S. Lewis
Giving
You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
– C.S. Lewis
Life
It is simple religions that are the made-up ones.
– C.S. Lewis
Religion
Sainthood lies in the habit of referring the smallest actions to God. Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.
– C.S. Lewis
Faith
Virtue-even attempted virtue-brings light; indulgence brings fog.
– C.S. Lewis
Virtue | Light
History is a story written by the finger of God.
– C.S. Lewis
God | History
You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.
– C.S. Lewis
God
To love is to be vulnerable.
– C.S. Lewis
Love
Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to manuever you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.
– C.S. Lewis
Satan
You play the hand you’re dealt. I think the game’s worthwhile.
– C.S. Lewis
Contentment
Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions.
– C.S. Lewis
Heaven
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
– C.S. Lewis
Happiness | Peace
I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.
– C.S. Lewis
Conscience
When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.
– C.S. Lewis
Marriage | Love
God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.
– C.S. Lewis
Renewal
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.
– C.S. Lewis
Perseverance | Repentance
Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.
– C.S. Lewis
Love | Friendship
All that we call human history–money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery–[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
– C.S. Lewis
Rebellion | Happiness | History
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.
– C.S. Lewis
Giving
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
– C.S. Lewis
Suffering | Nature
I believe there are too many practitioners in the church who are not believers.
– C.S. Lewis
Hypocrisy
True friends face in the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals.
– C.S. Lewis
Friendship | Goals
When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary.
– C.S. Lewis
Jesus | Salvation | Sacrifice
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
– C.S. Lewis
Believing
There is no neutral ground in the universe; every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counter-claimed by Satan.
– C.S. Lewis
God | Satan
God is not proud. He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him.
– C.S. Lewis
God | Pride
All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that “God is love.” But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.
– C.S. Lewis
Love | The Trinity
Christ wants a child’s heart, but a grown-up’s head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim.
– C.S. Lewis
Submission
No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that ‘In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth’.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy | Scripture | Truth
A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere–‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,’ as Herbert says, ‘fine nets and stratagems.’ God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.
– C.S. Lewis
The Bible | Atheism | Youth
And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies’ plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger.
– C.S. Lewis
Satan | Lying
When the author walks on the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right – something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise. It will be too late then to choose your side.
– C.S. Lewis
Eternity | Prophecy | Beauty
It is hard to have patience with people who say “There is no death” or “Death doesn’t matter.” There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.
– C.S. Lewis
Death | Atheism
The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.
– C.S. Lewis
Contentment | Joy
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.
– C.S. Lewis
Atheism
Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.
– C.S. Lewis
Conversion
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.
– C.S. Lewis
Christians | Eternity | History
He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.
– C.S. Lewis
Lust | The Heart
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
– C.S. Lewis
Eternity
If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, also we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for another world.
– C.S. Lewis
Eternity
If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
– C.S. Lewis
Good and Evil | Freedom | Joy
Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.
– C.S. Lewis
Politics | Pride | Men
I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
– C.S. Lewis
Atheism | Salvation | Repentance
When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.’
– C.S. Lewis
Death
I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.
– C.S. Lewis
Praise
The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development–
– C.S. Lewis
Achievement | Perseverance
You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.
– C.S. Lewis
Holiness | Repentance | Worldliness
These things are not strange, Small One, though they are beyond our senses.
– C.S. Lewis
Contentment
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
Suffering | Grief
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.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
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.
– C.S. Lewis
Miracles
Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.
– C.S. Lewis
Humility | Modesty
It is not your business to succeed, but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God.
– C.S. Lewis
Success
He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.
– C.S. Lewis
God
As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
– C.S. Lewis
Ignorance | Materialism | Victory
What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
– C.S. Lewis
Selfishness | Nature
If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. It cuts its own throat.
– C.S. Lewis
Atheism
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.
– C.S. Lewis
Pain
Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other.
– C.S. Lewis
Happiness | Honesty
Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
– C.S. Lewis
Forgiveness
Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.
– C.S. Lewis
Atheism
Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices.
– C.S. Lewis
God | Choices
God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form. The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
– C.S. Lewis
Salvation | Christ | Surrender
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
– C.S. Lewis
Friendship
A 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
Heaven
When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
– C.S. Lewis
Love
If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don’t feel at home there?
– C.S. Lewis
Atheism | Evolution
Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
– C.S. Lewis
Life | Eternity | Time
The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.
– C.S. Lewis
Ignorance
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
– C.S. Lewis
Truth | Examples
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self–all your wishes and precautions–to Christ.
– C.S. Lewis
Repentance
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
– C.S. Lewis
Giving
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.
– C.S. Lewis
Contentment | Thankfulness
Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy | Judging
That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.
– C.S. Lewis
Giving | Selfishness
The higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be.
– C.S. Lewis
Animals
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
– C.S. Lewis
Life | History | Men
What is outside the system of self-giving is no earth, nor nature, nor ‘ordinary life’, but simply and solely Hell. Yet even Hell derives from this law such reality as it has.
– C.S. Lewis
Giving | Nature
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
– C.S. Lewis
Life | The Future