If you’ve listened to a few sermons in your life, there is a pretty good chance you might have heard C.S. Lewis quoted. Lewis was born in 1898, and interestingly, died on the very day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, November 22, 1963. Born in Ireland, he never lost his affinity for "home" and missed the people so much that he often sought out other Irish living in England until he could again make one of his many return visits.
He held academic positions in English Literature at Cambridge and Oxford and wrote 30 books, including The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, and The Problem with Pain. He was, for a long while, a non-believer, but his conversion to Christianity in 1931 was in no small part due to the insight and encouragement provided by his friends, including J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings). But he went down fighting! Here is a quote from Lewis in his book Surprised By Joy. “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [College, Oxford], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." We might add that as an expert in mythology, Lewis recognized the Bible as something altogether different, something truthful.
Here are a number of other quotes from C.S. Lewis:
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'
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, and in the end, despair.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
(This one is thought-provoking!) When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you'd been the only man in the world.
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.
Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us... While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
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.
We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.
The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ.
There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.
Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.
Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.
End of C.S. Lewis quotes
To read a short bio about Charles Spurgeon, and read some interesting quotes, click here.
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