The C.S. Lewis Bible Quotes

“I believe no angel ever appears in Scripture without exciting terror:”
― C.S. Lewis, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“What will all that chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anaesthetic fog which we call “nature” or “the real world” fades away and the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
― C.S. Lewis, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person—and he would not need it. Remember, this 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.”
― C.S. Lewis, NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“They wanted, as we say, to “call their souls their own.” But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, “This is our business, not yours.” But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives. —from The Problem of Pain”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“The allegorical sense of her great action dawned on me the other day. The precious alabaster box wh. one must break over the Holy Feet is one’s heart. Easier said than done. And the contents become perfume only when it is broken. While they are safe inside they are more like sewage. All v. alarming. —from a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, November 1, 1954”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting.”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“Don’t bother about the idea that God “has known for millions of years exactly what you are about to pray.” That isn’t what it’s like. God is hearing you now, just as simply as a mother hears a child. The difference His timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite.”
― C.S. Lewis, NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“1It is good to give thanks to the LORD, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; 2to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night,”
― C.S. Lewis, NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“The Cost of Freedom God has made it a rule for Himself that He won’t alter people’s character by force. He can and will alter them—but only if the people will let Him. In that way He has really and truly limited His power. Sometimes we wonder why He has done so, or even wish that He hadn’t. But apparently He thinks it worth doing. He would rather have a world of free beings, with all its risks, than a world of people who did right like machines because they couldn’t do anything else. The more we succeed in imagining what a world of perfect automatic beings would be like, the more, I think, we shall see His wisdom. —from “ ‘The Trouble with “X,” ’ ” God in the Dock”
― C.S. Lewis, NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“The True Wealth 13Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding, 14for her income is better than silver,”
― C.S. Lewis, NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“AN EXPLANATION OF TIME: “Son,” he said, “ye cannot in your present state understand eternity . . . . But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except”
― C.S. Lewis, NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“Becoming the Enemy Where the tide flows towards increasing State control, Christianity, with its claims in one way personal and in the other way ecumenical and both ways antithetical to omnicompetent government, must always in fact (though not for a long time yet in words) be treated as an enemy. Like learning, like the family, like any ancient and liberal profession, like the common law, it gives the individual a standing ground against the State. Hence Rousseau, the father of the totalitarians, said wisely enough, from his own point of view, of Christianity, je ne connais rien de plus contrarie a l’esprit social [I know nothing more opposed to the social spirit] . . . . What a society has, that, be sure, and nothing else will it hand on to its young. The work is urgent, for men perish around us.”
― C.S. Lewis, NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will—that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings—then we may take it it is worth paying.”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“In theological language, no man can be saved by works.”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders?”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“But as St. Augustine points out, whatever God knew, Abraham at any rate did not know that his obedience could endure such a command until the event taught him: and the obedience which he did not know that he would choose, he cannot be said to have chosen.”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“The sin, both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave them free will: thus surrendering a portion of His omnipotence (it is again a deathlike or descending movement) because He saw that from a world of free creatures, even though they fell, He could work out (and this is the reascent) a deeper happiness and a fuller splendour than any world of automata would admit. —from Miracles”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“He loved us not because we were lovable, but because He is Love. It”
― C.S. Lewis, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“No child is begotten without pleasure. But the pleasure is not the cause of life—it is a symptom, something that happens when life is in fact being transmitted. In the same way “feeling love” is only the echo in consciousness of the real thing wh. lies deeper. —from a letter to Edith Gates, May 23, 1944”
― C.S. Lewis, NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“Iknow all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptations. It is not serious provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience etc doesn’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be v. muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, & the clean clothes are in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present to us: it is the v. sign of His presence.”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“My Redeemer Lives”
― C.S. Lewis, NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration

“Bildad Speaks: God Punishes the Wicked”
― C.S. Lewis, NRSV, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration