Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect... Quotes

“One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the importance of their disagreements.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“It is (according to one’s point of view) either a wonderful piece of luck or a wise provision of God’s, that poetry which was to be turned into all languages should have as its chief formal characteristic one that does not disappear (as mere metre does) in translation.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“our good temper down to ourselves. These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature;”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“Because in Christian morals ‘thy neighbour’ includes ‘thy enemy’, and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“A man who first tried to guess ‘what the public wants’, and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“By not belonging to a press-cutting agency I miss most of the bouquets and brickbats which are aimed at me. So I never saw the article you write about. But I have seen others of that kind, and they’ll break no bones of mine. Don’t, however, misjudge these ‘liberal Christians’. They genuinely believe that writers of my sort are doing a great deal of harm. They themselves find it impossible to accept most of the articles of the ‘faith once given to the saints’. They are nevertheless extremely anxious that some vestigial religion which they (not we) can describe as ‘Christianity’ should continue to exist and make numerous converts. They think these converts will come in only if this religion is sufficiently ‘de-mythologised’. The ship must be lightened if she is to keep afloat.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“In Pantheism God is all. But the whole point of creation surely is that He was not content to be all. He intends to be ‘all in all’.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“If we are free to delete all inconvenient data we shall certainly have no theological difficulties; but for the same reason no solutions and no progress.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“We can bear to be refused but not to be ignored. In other words, our faith can survive many refusals if they really are refusals and not mere disregards. The apparent stone will be bread to us if we believe that a Father’s hand put it into ours, in mercy or in justice or even in rebuke. It is hard and bitter, yet it can be chewed and swallowed.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“We all try to accept with some sort of submission our afflictions when they actually arrive. But the prayer in Gethsemane shows that the preceding anxiety is equally God’s will and equally part of our human destiny. The perfect Man experienced it. And the servant is not greater than the master. We are Christians, not Stoics.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“There was no region even in the innermost depth of one’s soul (nay, there least of all) which one could surround with a barbed wire fence and guard with a notice No Admittance. And that was what I wanted; some area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings, ‘This is my business and mine only.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“Sometimes I can almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself. Not that I might not have learned this sooner and more safely, in ways I shall now never know, without apostasy, but that Divine punishments are also mercies, and particular good is worked out of particular evil, and the penal blindness made sanative.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“You may ask how I combined this directly Atheistical thought, this great ‘Argument from Undesign’ with my Occultist fancies. I do not think I achieved any logical connection between them. They swayed me in different moods, and had only this in common, that both made against Christianity.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...

“If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons’ schools, the history of education would be very different.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters, Miracles; The Great Divorce; The Problem of Pain; A Grief Observed; The Abolition of Man; The Four Loves; Reflect...