“If God forgives us we must forgive ourselves otherwise its like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than him.”

—C.S. Lewis.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

—C.S. Lewis.

“Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.”

—C S Lewis.

It is better to forget about yourself altogether.”

—C S Lewis.

“In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere….God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”

—C. S. Lewis.

“As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.”

—C S Lewis.

“The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self–all your wishes and precautions–to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves.'”

—C S Lewis.

“Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.”

—C S Lewis.

‘Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”‘

—C S Lewis.

“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.”

—C S Lewis.

“As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.”

—C S Lewis.

“That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.”

—C S Lewis.

“When pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.”

—C S Lewis.

“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.”
—C S Lewis.

“Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God.”

—C S Lewis.

“To preach Christianity meant (to the Apostles) primarily to preach the Resurrection…The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts. The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the gospel or good news which the Christians brought.”

—C S Lewis.

“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love them.”

—C S Lewis.

“What we practise, not (save at rare intervals) what we preach, is usually our great contribution to the conversion of others.”

—C S Lewis.

“Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is…We never find out the strength of the impulse inside until we try to fight it.”

—C S Lewis.

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”

—C S Lewis.

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can’t. If a thing is free to be good it’s also free to be bad.”

—C S Lewis.

“Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms…surrendering. This process of surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance.”

“Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.

If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road.”

—C S Lewis. 

“We live in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”

—C S Lewis. 

“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.”

—C S Lewis. 

“I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”

—C S Lewis. 

“The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds him liking more and more people as he goes on – including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.”

—C S Lewis. 

“God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has.”

C S Lewis, The Problem of Pain. 

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal…

It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit… 

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”

—C. S. Lewis,The Weight of Glory.

“What can you ever really know of other people’s souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole of creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands.”

—C S Lewis.