Famous Inspirational CS Lewis Quotes about Love, Life, Humility and God

C. S. Lewis was a famous Irish author who wrote more than 30 books, but he is best known throughout the world for his fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia.

While teaching at Magdalen College, a part of Oxford University, C.S. Lewis joined a literary group called The Inklings along with his fellow writer J. R. R. Tolkien. There, Lewis re-embraced Christianity and earned fame for writing apologist texts in which he explained spirituality by means of logic and philosophy.

During World War II, when people relied on faith almost entirely, Lewis began giving radio broadcasts on Christianity. His speeches became very popular in such dark times and won many converts.

C. S. Lewis is regarded as one of the most important writers of the 20^th century.

103 Famous Inspirational C.S. Lewis Quotes about Love, Life, Humility and God

C.S. Lewis quotes on life

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

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

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

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

I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also harder to bear.

It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.

Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different…

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

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.

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

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

Miracles 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.

Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.

The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.

We are what we believe we are.

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

I sometimes wonder if all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

Of all the bad men, religious bad men are the worst.

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

Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.

In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s, we do not accept them easily enough.

We do not want merely to see beauty… We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

C.S. Lewis quotes on friendship

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

A noble friend is the best gift. A noble enemy is the next best.

What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.

The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.

People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.

It's all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies - fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past.

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden).

C.S. Lewis quotes on love

Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone you will presently come to love him.

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

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life.

They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself.

Of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense -- love as distinct from ‘being in love’ -- is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity,

Being in love first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.

C.S. Lewis quotes on humility

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility.

Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality.

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is especially true of humility.

It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

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.

True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.

We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good; if bad, because it works in us patience, humility, contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.

Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue.

The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual.

The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means that you are very conceited indeed.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

C.S. Lewis quotes on God

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

Though our feelings come and go, God’s love for us does not.

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 own eyes also. Is love content with that?

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

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.

Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?

When you are arguing against God you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.

There would be no sense in saying you trusted Jesus if you would not take his advice.

No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God, but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

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

Nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.

To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.

C.S. Lewis Narnia quotes

One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.

Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.

Remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.

‘Girls aren't very good at keeping maps in their brains’, said Edmund, ‘That's because we've got something in them’, replied Lucy.

But very quickly they all became grave again: for, as you know, there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

It will. Things always work according to their nature.

But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.

Narnia! It's all in the wardrobe just like I told you!

‘When I'm older I'll understand’ said Lucy, ‘I am older and I don't think I want to understand", replied Edmund’

I don't know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I'd rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven.

She remembered, as every sensible person does, that you should never, never shut yourself up in a wardrobe.

That world is ended, as if it had never been. Let the race of Adam and Eve take warning.

For jokes as well as justice come in with speech.

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.