100+ Famous C.S. Lewis Quotes That Inspire, Challenge & Transform

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

“You cannot know how brave you are until being brave is your only option.”

“Fear is the mother of foresight.”

“Relying on God has to start all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”

“If we take the whole field of love or sacrifice or humility or heroism as a battlefield, then it is clear that the Enemy (Satan) does want to prevent us from getting there at all.”

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”

“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him.”

“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”

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

“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement.”

“It is to those who knock at the door of feeling that He most often says, ‘I have no pleasure in you.’”

“We are not merely imperfect creatures who need to be improved: we are rebels who need to lay down our arms.”

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good.”

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.”

“The sweetest things in life are not heard or seen, but felt.”

“Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing.”

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable.”

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’”

“Lovers are more likely to quarrel about nothing than about anything.”

“The greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.”

“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”

“You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

“The essence of all tyranny is to force the individual to act against his will.”

“Gratitude is not only the highest of virtues but the parent of all others.”

“Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”

“All joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still about to be.”

“The longing for a country we’ve never seen—this is the secret of joy.”

“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.”

“Joy is the repudiation of the self.”

“Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

“What we call ‘the present’ is the edge of eternity pressing in upon time.”

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

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

“The Christian way is different: fortune or misfortune, thunder or sunshine, welcomed or rejected, the same thanksgiving.”

“We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

“The doors of hell are locked on the inside.”

“Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”

“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.”

“Doubt is our ally, not our enemy.”

“A man can’t be always defending truth; he must sometimes preach it, teach it, rejoice in it.”

“Experience, however, can never prove or disprove the existence of God.”

“Theology is the science of God and of the soul’s relation to Him.”

“Only a man who knows what it is like to live without God can appreciate the full meaning of living with Him.”

“Christianity is not a doctrine, but a story.”

“The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation.”

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had a single key.”

“The problem of pain is the problem of man.”

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.”

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.”

“God allows us to experience sorrow so that we might understand compassion.”

“Sometimes God shakes a man to show him he is not God.”

“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to.”

“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.”

“Heaven will solve our problems, but not by showing us what we expected to see.”

“The Christian hope is not a mere optimism; it is not a vague trust that everything will somehow work out.”

“The demand of the loveless and self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to alienate themselves, to exclude themselves, to be their own gods, is granted.”

“When pain comes, the real work of life begins.”

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

“Can a mortal ask questions which God, by very nature, cannot answer?”

“There is no use trying to be more spiritual than God.”

“Imagination is the organ of meaning.”

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

“The value of myths is that they dramatize truths so that instead of having them merely in our heads, we feel them in our guts.”

“Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”

“Since it is so unlikely that any animal should ever love you, and equally unlikely that you should find one you could love, perhaps the wisest course is to accept the situation and make your plaything.”

“The sweetest joys are those we give.”

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.”

“Fiction is fact encrypted, truth disguised.”

“Myths are the nearest things to realities.”

“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”

“You can’t study history without learning that the terrible thing is not that men despise truth, but that they love lies.”

“Art has the right to be unpopular.”

“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.”

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”

“There are all sorts of temptations to stop you doing the right thing, but the worst of all is the constant temptation to do nothing.”

“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is done in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices.”

“The devil always sends errors into the world in pairs—two opposites.”

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

“Nothing is more dangerous than an ignorant good man.”

“Hell is a state of mind—ye can’t take it with ye.”

“The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.”

“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

“The essential vice, the utmost evil, is pride.”

“To be happy, we must not be too interested in happiness.”

“You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

“You must lay aside all arrogance. You mustn’t think yourself better than the people who believe in fairies.”

“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

“The man who says it is irrational to believe in God is really saying that all thoughts are irrational.”

“Thought can be reduced to chemistry, but only if you believe in magic.”

“If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry on the meaningless processes of the blind physical world, then it seems impossible to believe in the validity of thought.”

“I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of evidence is against it.”

“A man can’t be always defending truth; he must sometimes preach it, teach it, rejoice in it.”

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

“The two heads of a serpent are no less deadly than the one.”

“The poison of skepticism spreads.”

“A little learning makes a man dangerous.”

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

“Eternity is not endless time, but something outside time altogether.”

“The present is the point at which time touches eternity.”

“Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age.”

“We are far too easily pleased.”

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

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”

“The command ‘Be perfect’ is not idealistic pedantry. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. It is first an invitation to share in the nature of God.”

“What we call ‘progress’ may simply be the movement from one kind of trouble to another.”

“Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.”

“The great thing is to be found of one’s appointed task, however humble, and never to shrink from it.”

“There is no such thing as a spiritual vacation.”

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”

“You must ask for God's help, even when you cannot feel Him.”

“We are not animals. We are not machines. We are persons.”

“The Christian life is not a series of events. It is a relationship.”

“We are not merely imperfect creatures who need to be improved: we are rebels who need to lay down our arms.”

“The law of human nature tells us that we know the difference between right and wrong.”

“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

“The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.”

“What we do now echoes in eternity.”

“We are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.”

“Your beliefs will not be tested by what you know, but by what you do.”