The quotations of

C. S. Lewis

British writer, lay theologian, and scholar

1898–1963

151 quotes, most often on God, Christianity and Morality. Part of the Writers collection.

This moment contains all moments.
The Great Divorce
- Time
It is in their ‘good’ characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations.
A Preface to Paradise Lost
- Writing
The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.
Reflections on the Psalms
- Christianity
Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.
Letter to I.O. Evans
- Art
Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one.
The Problem of Pain
- Christianity
If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.
- Experience
The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don’t.
- Religion
We all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men ‘after our own heart.’ Only they really know our mind and only they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread. The little pockets of early Chrstians survived because they cared exclusively for the love of ‘the bretheren’ and stopped their ears to the opinion of the Pagan society around them. But a circle of criminals, cranks, or perverts survives in just the same way; by becoming deaf to the opinion of the outer world, by discounting it as the chatter of outsiders who ‘don’t understand,’ of the ‘conventional,’ the ‘bourgeois,’ the ‘Establishment,’ of prigs, prudes, and humbugs.
Many things⁠—such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly⁠—are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
A Preface to Paradise Lost
- God
Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?
A Preface to Paradise Lost
Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.
“On Three Ways of Writing for Children” (1952); in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
- Age
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
- Failure
Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.
The Abolition of Man
- Morality
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
Mere Christianity (1952), Book II, Chapter 2, “The Invasion”
- Morality

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