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CS Lewis

Portrait of CS Lewis — Portrait: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

AUTHOR PROFILE

CS Lewis

CS Lewis is described in biographical records as a British writer, lay theologian, and scholar (1898–1963) (1898–1963). The selections gathered here touch on atonement, honesty, jesus christ. This profile brings the attributed quotations together with their available source information.

“People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you, and if you don’t, I’ll do other things.’ I do not think that this is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature.”

— CS Lewis

Biography at a glance

Profile: British writer, lay theologian, and scholar (1898–1963)
Life: 1898–1963
Quotes in this collection: 73

Life and work

Biographical records connect CS Lewis with University College, Oxford and Campbell College. Works associated with CS Lewis include The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity. This collection includes 73 quotations credited to CS Lewis. Each quotation page preserves its own citation, when supplied, so readers can follow the passage back to its stated context.

Reading the quotations

The selections gathered here touch on atonement, honesty, jesus christ. These topic links make it easier to compare these words with other voices in the LDS Flow library. Citations are shown on the individual quotation pages where the source collection provided them.

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Sources and further reading

Background on CS Lewis

Quotes by CS Lewis

73 quotes

“There is someone 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.”

The Essential C.S. Lewis

“Love is the great conqueror of lust.”

Mere Christianity

“Have ye received his image in your countenances?” “Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has. At first, only for moments. Then for longer periods. Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into . . . a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God; which shares His power, joy, knowledge and eternity.”

Mere Christianity

“It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them…I empathically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it — that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. I believe, on the contrary, that ‘they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will.'”

The Problem of Pain

“The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world; but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. “It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle in our return to God; a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”

The Problem of Pain

“We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about ‘pie in the sky’, and of being told that we are trying to ‘escape’ from the duty of making a happy world here and now into the dreams of a happy world elsewhere. But either there is a ‘pie in the sky’ or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric.”

The Problem of Pain

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. . . . It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.

Mere Christianity

“We have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing God means to make us.”

Mere Christianity

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you do not find out the strength of the German army by fighting it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try and fight it: and Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who know to the full what temptation means – the only complete realist.”

Mere Christianity

“If you are a nice person–if virtue comes easily to you–beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own merits what are really God’s gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous.”

Mere Christianity

“The relationship between Creator and creature is, of course, unique, and cannot be paralleled by any relations between one creature and another. God is both further from us, and nearer to us, than any other being…He makes, we are made; He is original, we derivative. But at the same time, and for some reason, the intimacy between God and even the meanest creature is closer than any that creatures can attain with one another.”

The Problem of Pain

“Aim at heaven and you will get the earth thrown in; aim at earth and you will get neither.”

Mere Christianity

“We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman.’ Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).”

The Four Loves

“It is clear that this knowledge of his death must have somehow been withdrawn from him before he prayed in Gethsemane. He could not, with whatever reservation about the Father’s will, have prayed that the cup might pass and simultaneously known that it would not. That is both a logical and psychological impossibility. You see what this involves? Lest any trial incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope – of suspense, anxiety- were at the last moment looser upon him – the supposed possibility that, after all, he might, he just conceivably might, be spared from the supreme horror. There was precedent. Isaac had hern spared; he too at the last moment, he also against all apparent possibility. But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and the consequent tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps he would not have been very man. To live in a fully predictable world is not to be man.”

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.”

The Weight of Glory

“Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.”

The Chronicles of Narnia

“Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think is trustworthy. 99% of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I cannot prove by abstract reasoning that there is such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the coalition of blood on authority.”

Mere Christianity

“Can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers?”

What Christmas Means to Me

“That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and product what we call miracles, is a part of Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world demands that these occasions should be extremely rare.”

The Problem of Pain

“The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under.”

The Screwtape Letters

“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.”

Mere Christianity

“Pride is the complete anti-God state of mind. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say people are proud of being rich or clever or good looking, but they are not. They are proud being richer or cleverer or better looking than others.”

Mere Christianity

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

“For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect love: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself….Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres. After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of ourselves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.”

Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis