Quotes by C.S. Lewis

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.

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

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

A man can no more diminish Gods 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.

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.

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.

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

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?

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.

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.

Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You cant 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---dont keep on looking at it.

For you will certainly carry out Gods purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.

Hes not safe, but hes good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

[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 chemists shop.

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.

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.

He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

I seemed to hear God saying, Put down your gun and well talk.