Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a staunch atheist, who converted to Christianity in his early thirties, and became one of the most articulate Christian apologists of all time. He had a unique way of reaching people with his Christian beliefs through his extensive writing career. Some of his classic works include Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and The Chronicles of Narnia. His writings have been cited by Christian apologists for generations. Below are some of his most famous quotes.1
“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
“The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.”
“Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”
“Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.”
“If you never take risks, you’ll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.”
“If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.”
“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
“God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.”
“The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.”
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
“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.”
“The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”
“Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
“If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.”
“Love is the great conqueror of lust.”
“Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?”
“I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.”
“You cannot make men good by law.”
“You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.”
“The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.”
1 All of the following quotes are from the websites below:
Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis (bibleportal.com)
403 C.S. Lewis Quotes – ChristianQuotes.info
C. S. Lewis Quotes – Word Counter (word-counter.com)
C.S. Lewis Quotes (Author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) (goodreads.com)