Clive Staples Lewis: Quotes about God

Clive Staples Lewis was Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist. Explore interesting quotes on god.
Clive Staples Lewis: 544 quotes11 likes

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Four Loves

The Four Loves (1960)

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Letter (19 April 1951); published in Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), p. 230

“The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter XV
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy (1955)

“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.”

Clive Staples Lewis

Letters of C. S. Lewis (29 April 1959), para. 1, p. 285 — as reported in The Quotable Lewis (1989), p. 469

“Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

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

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed (1961)

“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 11

“I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

Clive Staples Lewis

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

“Looking for God—or Heaven—by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.”

Clive Staples Lewis

"The Seeing Eye", in Christian Reflections (1967), p. 167

“The miracles in fact 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. Of that larger script part is already visible, part is still unsolved. In other words, some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"Miracles" (1942), p. 29
God in the Dock (1970)

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'
A Grief Observed (1961)

“Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory."”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Four Loves

Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection — if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.
The Four Loves (1960)

“Are the gods not just?”

Clive Staples Lewis book Till We Have Faces

'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?'"
Orual & The Fox
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)