A Year with C.S. Lewis Quotes

“Supposing We Really Found Him? It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. ‘Look out!’ we cry, ‘it’s alive’. And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. As”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“A tree is known by its fruit; or, as we say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the ‘cause’, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“When we merely say that we are bad, the ‘wrath’ of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“He will be infinitely merciful to our repeated failures; I know no promise that He will accept a deliberate compromise. For He has, in the last resort, nothing to give us but Himself; and He can give that only insofar as our self-affirming will retires and makes room for Him in our souls.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy, and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble—because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“You would think they could not fail to see the application. You would expect to find the ‘low’ churchman genuflecting and crossing himself lest the weak conscience of his ‘high’ brother should be moved to irreverence, and the ‘high’ one refraining from these exercises lest he should betray his ‘low’ brother into idolatry. And so it would have been but for our ceaseless labour. Without that the variety of usage within the Church of England might have become a positive hotbed of charity and humility. —from The Screwtape Letters”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no difference what you have chosen instead.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“Therefore, in love, He claims all. There’s no bargaining with Him.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“The very words repentance, regeneration, the New Man, suggest something very different. Some tendencies in each natural man may have to be simply rejected.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ‘religion’ mean nothing unless they make our actual behaviour better; just as in an illness ‘feeling better’ is not much good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“pride always means enmity—it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“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.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. —from Mere Christianity”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: every one is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his ‘bad days’ and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“What God does for us, He does in us.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“Does it matter to a man dying in a desert by which choice of route he missed the only well?”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“A man’s love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works