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Clive Staples Lewis Quotes
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Clive Staples Lewis was a British writer and lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Oxford University and Cambridge University . He is best known for his works of fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.

Lewis and fellow novelist J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends. They both served on the English faculty at Oxford University and were active in the informal Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. According to Lewis's memoir Surprised by Joy, he was baptised in the Church of Ireland, but fell away from his faith during adolescence. Lewis returned to Anglicanism at the age of 32, owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, and he became an "ordinary layman of the Church of England". Lewis's faith profoundly affected his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.

Lewis wrote more than 30 books which have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies. The books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have sold the most and have been popularised on stage, TV, radio, and cinema. His philosophical writings are widely cited by Christian apologists from many denominations.

In 1956, Lewis married American writer Joy Davidman; she died of cancer four years later at the age of 45. Lewis died on 22 November 1963 from kidney failure, one week before his 65th birthday. In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis was honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. Wikipedia  

✵ 29. November 1898 – 22. November 1963  •  Other names C.S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis photo
Clive Staples Lewis: 272 quotes11 likes

Clive Staples Lewis Quotes

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis

"Is Theology Poetry?" (1945)

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 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.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

“It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 6, "Christian Marriage"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“I am sorry that my convictions do not allow me to repeat my friend’s offer, said one of the others. But I have had to abandon the humanitarian and egalitarian fancies. His name was Mr. Neo-Classical.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 89
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 5

“Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, on their view, exist…”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)
Variant: "Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist."

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

Clive Staples Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), Ch. 1
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956)

“John – I’m trying to find the Island in the West. Sensible – You refer, no doubt to some aesthetic experience.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 77
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“My dear Wormwood,
I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter I
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

“The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.”

Clive Staples Lewis

As quoted in part 2 of Sherwood Eliot Wirt in "The Final Interview of C. S. Lewis" (1963) http://www1.cbn.com/narnia/the-final-interview-of-c.-s.-lewis

“As image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"Priestesses in the Church?" (1948), p. 237
God in the Dock (1970)

“Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“If we cannot "practice the presence of God," it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep. Bur for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Four Loves

"Charity"
The Four Loves (1960)

“I have always — at least, ever since I can remember — had a kind of longing for death.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Psyche
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Letter (8 November 1952); published in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 247

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

“Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food more than another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed (1961)

“What can you ever really know of other people's souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book IV, Chapter 10, "Nice People or New Men"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“'God!' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape.
'God what?' asked the Spirit.
'What do you mean, "God what"?' asked the Ghost.
'In our grammar God is a noun' said the Spirit.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9

“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Letter to Arthur Greeves (29 December 1935) — in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963) (1979), p. 477

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere… God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Source: Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 191

“"I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment…"”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 8

“In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1963)

“Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul—nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that.”

Clive Staples Lewis book That Hideous Strength

Source: That Hideous Strength (1945), Ch. 16 : Banquet at Belbury, section 6

“[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9

“If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"Vivisection" (1947), p. 227
God in the Dock (1970)

“The Guide sang: The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, And fools crying, Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun! The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run Faster for ever, The old age is done, We have new lights and see without the sun. (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 186–187
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia

The Last Battle (1956), Closing lines, in Ch. 16: Farewell to Shadowlands
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956)

“God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

“What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all".”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Four Loves

"Charity"
The Four Loves (1960)

“I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are his will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless he bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?”

Clive Staples Lewis book Perelandra

Perelandra (1943)

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 10, "Hope"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"Vivisection" (1947), p. 228
God in the Dock (1970)

“Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

“The Spirit of the Age wishes to allow argument and not to allow argument. … If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue themselves to show that their own doctrines are true. … You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 63
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“He [the devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error 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.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book IV, chapter 6, "Two Notes"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Source: Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, p. 90

“I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed (1961)

“Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

“Who believes in Aslan nowadays?”

Clive Staples Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia

Prince Caspian (1951), Ch. 5.: Caspian's Adventure In The Mountains
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956)

“Then he tried to recall the lessons of Mr. Wisdom. “it is I myself, eternal Spirit, who drives this Me, the slave, along that ledge. I ought not to care whether he falls and breaks his neck or not. It is not he that is real, it is I – I – I.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Pilgrim's Regress

Pilgrim’s Regress 137
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)

“I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

“The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull…”

Clive Staples Lewis

Diary entry regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, (July 1924), published in Letters (1966), p. 97

“This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again…. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book I, Chapter 5, "We Have Cause to Be Uneasy"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”

Clive Staples Lewis

The Weight of Glory (1949)

“If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Miracles

Source: Miracles (1947), Ch. 1: "The Scope of this Book"

“"Milton was right," said my Teacher. "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery."”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9