"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
— C.S. Lewis

"Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. "
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"Give me all of you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! I have not come to torment or frustrate the natural man or woman, but to KILL IT! No half measures will do. I don’t want to only prune a branch here and a branch there; rather I want the whole tree out! Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires, all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them ALL over to me, give yourself to me and I will make of you a new self---in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

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

"Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
— C.S. Lewis

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
— C.S. Lewis

"…until the theologians and the ordained clergy begin to communicate with ordinary people in the vernacular, in a way that they can understand, I’m going to have to do this sort of thing."
— C.S. Lewis

"I seemed to hear God saying, "Put down your gun and we'll talk."
— C.S. Lewis

"The mark of Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

"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."
— C.S. Lewis

"At the end of things, The Blessed will say, “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.” And the lost will say, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly."
— C.S. Lewis

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurt abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."
— C.S. Lewis

"The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"My own eyes are not enough for me; I will see through those of others."
— C.S. Lewis

"This moment contains all moments."
— C.S. Lewis

"Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement."
— C.S. Lewis

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."
— C.S. Lewis

"You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."
— C.S. Lewis

"Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him."
— C.S. Lewis (Perelandra)

"We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, we should begin to wonder if perhaps were were created for another world."
— C.S. Lewis

"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. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

"And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back-if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?"
— C.S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet)

"Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger."
— C.S. Lewis

"His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. There is no limit to His power.

If you choose to say, 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prifex to them the two other words, 'God can.'

It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place."
— C.S. Lewis

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."
— C.S. Lewis (The World's Last Night: And Other Essays)

"Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature."
— C.S. Lewis (Miracles)