C. S. Lewis Quotes

You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.

Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

Don't shine so that others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see HIM.

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.

Believe in God like you believe in the sunrise. Not because you can see it, but because you can see all it touches.

The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.

If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.

Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

There are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid and disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine because that is how God loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but He delights to give.

The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

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.

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

There is someone that I love even though I don't approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is......me.

He (the devil) always sends errors into the world in pairs--pairs of opposites...He relies on your extra dislike of one to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.

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.

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

To forgive the incessant provocations of daily life - to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son - how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night, “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what he says.

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. It doesn't change God - it changes me.

Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

God doesn't want something from us. He simply wants us.

Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

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

Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

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.

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

For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.

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.'

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.

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.

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.

You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.

On the back of Satan's neck is a nail scarred footprint.

When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.

We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.

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.

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.

After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us toward is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.

One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.