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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

“Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”

The Four Loves

“The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”

Mere Christianity

“Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service, you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.”

Mere Christianity

“There have been differences between civilization’s moralities. But these have never amounted to anything like a total difference…men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four, but they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.”

Mere Christianity

“All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by the words ‘I ought’ or ‘I ought not’…Morality is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be ‘given’ in the facts of experience.”

The Problem of Pain

“Do not think that I am saying anything against science. I am only saying what its job is. If there is something behind, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing are neither of them statements that science can make.”

Mere Christianity

“Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. Just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.”

Mere Christianity

“[While discussing the debate between faith and works] “It does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary.”

Mere Christianity

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”

“I cannot myself see why these things (ordinances) should be conductors of the new life. But then, if one did not happen to know, I should never had seen any connection between a particular physical pleasure and the appearance of a new human being in the world. We have to take reality as it comes to us; there is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like.”

Mere Christianity

“Repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before he will take you back and which he could let you off if he chose. It is simply a description of what going back to him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking him to let you back without going back.”

Mere Christianity

“The more often [one] feels without acting, the less [one] will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less [he or she] will be able to feel.”

The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 61.

“Think of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The moral law is not any one instinct or set of instincts; it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.”

“The difference is that Christianity thinks this dark power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with duelism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war , a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.”

Mere Chrisitanity

“It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses – say motherly love or patriotism – are good, and others, like sex or fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which fighting instinct or sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining motherly love or patriotism.”

Mere Christianity

“In the Christian story, God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature.”

Miracles

“The people never admire a man for doing something he likes; the very words ‘But he likes it’ imply the corollary ‘And therefore it has no merit’. Yet Kant stands the obvious truth, noted by Aristotle, that the more virtuous a man becomes the more he enjoys virtuous actions.”

The Problem of Pain

“The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach trivial meaning to the word love…What we would here and now call our ‘happiness’ is not the end God chiefly has in view; but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.”

The Problem of Pain

“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 said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’.”

The Problem of Pain

“We find in our Prayer Book that Psalm 110 is one of those appointed for Christmas Day. We may at first be surprised by this. There is nothing in it about peace and goodwill, nothing remotely suggestive of the stable at Bethlehem. … The note is not ‘Peace and goodwill’ but ‘Beware. He’s coming’.”

Reflections on the Psalms

“The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a foetus inside a woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.”

Mere Christianity

“For God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been, more glorious than any unfallen race now is. . . . And this super-added glory will, with true vicariousness, exalt all creatures.”

The Grand Miracle

“If we are to think about morality, we must think of three departments; relations between man and man; things inside each man; and relations between man and the power that made him.”

Mere Christianity

“Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letterbox, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go.”

What Christmas Means to Me