Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963), commonly known as C.S. Lewis, was a British writer and scholar. He is best known for his works of fiction, especially “The Chronicles of Narnia” series, which has become a classic in children’s literature. The series includes seven books, starting with “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland (now Northern Ireland), and he held academic positions at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He was a versatile writer, contributing to various genres, including literary criticism, theology, and Christian apologetics.
Some of his notable non-fiction works include “Mere Christianity,” “The Problem of Pain,” and “The Screwtape Letters.” Lewis was a Christian and his faith had a significant influence on his writings. His apologetic works, in particular, have been widely read and appreciated.
C.S. Lewis’s impact extends beyond his literary works; he was a member of the informal literary group known as the “Inklings,” which included notable figures like J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis’s legacy endures through his writings, which continue to be influential and widely read across the world.
C. S. Lewis Quotes
1. “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
— C. S. Lewis
2. “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”
— C. S. Lewis
3. “Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.”
— C. S. Lewis
4. “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
— C. S. Lewis
5. “There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
— C. S. Lewis
6. “We are what we believe we are.”
— C. S. Lewis
7. “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
— C. S. Lewis
8. “When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.”
— C. S. Lewis
9. “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
10. “Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”
— C. S. Lewis
11. “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different…”
— C. S. Lewis
12. “The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
— C. S. Lewis
13. “You can make anything by writing.”
— C. S. Lewis
14. “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.”
— C. S. Lewis
15. “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, the only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
— C. S. Lewis
16. “Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.”
— C. S. Lewis
17. “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
18. “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
— C. S. Lewis
19. “Courage, dear heart.”
— C. S. Lewis
20. “Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.”
— C. S. Lewis
21. “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
— C. S. Lewis
22. “God doesn’t want something from us. He simply wants us.”
— C. S. Lewis
23. “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. It doesn’t change God – it changes me.”
— C. S. Lewis
24. “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
— C. S. Lewis
25. “All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”
— C. S. Lewis
26. “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
— C. S. Lewis
27. “Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.”
— C. S. Lewis
28. “The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.”
— C. S. Lewis
29. “Put first things first and second things are thrown in. Put second things first and you lose both first and second things.”
— C. S. Lewis
30. “For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”
— C. S. Lewis
31. “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
— C. S. Lewis
32. “No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.”
— C. S. Lewis
33. “When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.”
— C. S. Lewis
34. “We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
— C. S. Lewis
35. “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.”
— C. S. Lewis
36. “It is not your business to succeed, but to do right. When you have done so the rest lies with god.”
— C. S. Lewis
37. “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?”
— C. S. Lewis
38. “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.”
— C. S. Lewis
39. “And this is the marvel of marvels; that he called me Beloved.”
— C. S. Lewis
40. “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.”
— C. S. Lewis
41. “Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.”
— C. S. Lewis
42. “If one could run without getting tired I don’t think one would often want to do anything else.”
— C. S. Lewis
43. “We meet no ordinary people in our lives.”
— C. S. Lewis
44. “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.”
— C. S. Lewis
45. “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
— C. S. Lewis
46. “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.”
— C. S. Lewis
47. “Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.”
— C. S. Lewis
48. “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
— C. S. Lewis
49. “The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
— C. S. Lewis
50. “You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.”
— C. S. Lewis
51. “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.”
— C. S. Lewis
52. “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.”
— C. S. Lewis
53. “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”
— C. S. Lewis
54. “He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.”
— C. S. Lewis
55. “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.”
— C. S. Lewis
56. “Jesus was either a Liar, a Lunatic, or a Lord.”
— C. S. Lewis
57. “You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.”
— C. S. Lewis
58. “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
— C. S. Lewis
59. “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.”
— C. S. Lewis
60. “To love at all is to be vulnerable.”
— C. S. Lewis
61. “Don’t shine so that others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see HIM.”
— C. S. Lewis
62. “I was not born to be free – I was born to adore and obey.”
— C. S. Lewis
63. “A woman’s heart should be so close to God that a man should have to chase Him to find her.”
— C. S. Lewis
64. “Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.”
— C. S. Lewis
65. “And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history – money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery – the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
— C. S. Lewis
66. “Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.”
— C. S. Lewis
67. “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
68. “Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.”
— C. S. Lewis
69. “What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.”
— C. S. Lewis
70. “I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much are what make us perfect.”
— C. S. Lewis
71. “It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.”
— C. S. Lewis
72. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
— C. S. Lewis
73. “The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.”
— C. S. Lewis
74. “Things never happen the same way twice.”
— C. S. Lewis
75. “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”
— C. S. Lewis
76. “For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
— C. S. Lewis
77. “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
— C. S. Lewis
78. “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 without meaning.”
— C. S. Lewis
79. “What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”
— C. S. Lewis
80. “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.”
— C. S. Lewis
81. “Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
— C. S. Lewis
82. “Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don’t agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ.”
— C. S. Lewis
83. “You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.”
— C. S. Lewis
84. “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
— C. S. Lewis
85. “Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”
— C. S. Lewis
86. “There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.”
— C. S. Lewis
87. “In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”
— C. S. Lewis
88. “Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest upon reciprocity.”
— C. S. Lewis
89. “The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.”
— C. S. Lewis
90. “Nothing is yet in its true form.”
— C. S. Lewis
91. “When things go wrong, you’ll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.”
— C. S. Lewis
92. “Friendship is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”
— C. S. Lewis
93. “In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.”
— C. S. Lewis
94. “Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
— C. S. Lewis
95. “Suspicion often creates what it suspects.”
— C. S. Lewis
96. “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.”
— C. S. Lewis
97. “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
98. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
— C. S. Lewis
99. “The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.”
— C. S. Lewis
100. “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
— C. S. Lewis
