"We may note in passing that He was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three results–Hatred–Terror–Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild admiration” Source: God in the Dock

“There (in the Psalms) ... I find an experience fully God-centered, asking of God no gift more urgently than His Presence, the gift of Himself, joyous to the highest degree, and unmistakably real” Source: Reflections on the Psalms

"Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods” Source: Mere Christianity

“Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate” Source: The Efficacy of Prayer

"The Lion was singing still. But now the song had once more changed. It was more like what we should call a tune, but it was also far wilder. It made you want to run and jump and climb. It made you want to shout” Source: The Magician's Nephew

“It will never be lawful simply to ‘be ourselves’ until ‘ourselves’ have become sons of God” Source: God in the Dock

“What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring” Source: The Pilgrim's Regress

“St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (I Cor. viii. 3)” Source: The Weight of Glory

"We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is 'good,' because it is good, if 'bad' because it works in us patience, humility and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country” Source: Letters: C.S. Lewis/Don Giovanni Calabria (Aug. 10, 1948)

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them …” 1/2

“I think that all Christians have found that he [satan] is very active near the altar or on the eve of conversion; worldly anxieties, physical discomforts, lascivious fancies, doubt, are often poured in at such junctures … But Grace is not frustrated” Source: Letters of C.S. Lewis

"We shall then first be true persons when we have suffered ourselves to be fitted into our places. We are marble waiting to be shaped, metal waiting to be run into a mould” Source: ‘Membership’ in The Weight of Glory

“Gratitude exclaims, very properly: 'How good of God to give me this.' Adoration says: “What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!' One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun” Source: Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer

"Conditions … are not causes” Source: The Allegory of Love

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer …” 1/2

“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” Source: Letters of C. S. Lewis

"Christianity is not a patent medicine. Christianity claims to give an account of facts—to tell you what the real universe is like …” 1/2

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions …” 1/2

"I think we must attack wherever we meet it the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true” Source: God in the Dock

“If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house” Source: Mere Christianity

“Disobedience to conscience makes the conscience blind” Source: A Preface to Paradise Lost

“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 …” 1/2

“Human life has always been lived on the edge of precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would have never begun …” 1/2

"The more 'up to date' the book is, the sooner it will be dated” Source: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

"The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become — because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be …” 1/2

“There are three images in my mind which I must continually forsake and replace by better ones: the false image of God, the false image of my neighbours, and the false image of myself” Source: The Great Divorce

“God may be more than moral goodness; He is not less. The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended; but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, …” 1/2

"If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly." "Then, he isn't safe?" said Lucy. 1/2

“Abstain from thinking about other people's faults, unless your duties as a teacher or parent make it necessary to think about them. Whenever the thoughts come unnecessarily into one's mind, why not simply shove them away? And think of one's own faults instead? For there, …” 1/2

“Emotional intensity is in itself no proof of spiritual depth. If we pray in terror we shall pray earnestly; it only proves that terror is an earnest emotion. Only God Himself can let the bucket down to the depths in us” Source: Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer

"I do not maintain that God's creation of Nature can be proved as rigorously as God's existence, but it seems to me overwhelmingly probable, so probable that no one who approached the question with an open mind would very seriously entertain any other hypothesis” Source: Miracles

“‘What are we to make of Christ?' There is no question of what we can make of Him, it is entirely a question of what He intends to make of us. You must accept or reject the story” Source: God in the Dock

"He [God] makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one” Source: The Problem of Pain

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship” Source: The Weight of Glory

“It much easier to pray for a bore than to go visit him” Source: Letters to Malcolm

“You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it” Source: The Abolition of Man

“Gratitude exclaims, very properly: 'How good of God to give me this.' Adoration says: “What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!' One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun” Source: Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer

“If nothing remains except what could be equally well stated without Christian formulae, then the honest thing is to admit that Christianity is untrue and to begin over again without it” Source: Horrid Red Things

“What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring” Source: The Pilgrim's Regress

“Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him” Source: Letters of C.S. Lewis

“A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God” Source: Letters to Malcolm

“A rejection, or in Scripture's strong language, a crucifixion of the natural self is the passport to everlasting life. Nothing that has not died will be resurrected” Source: Membership

“[God] would rather have a world of free beings, with all its risks, than a world of people who did right like machines because they couldn't do anything else …” 1/2

“And so at last they got on the move. Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan” Source: Prince Caspian

"Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it” Source: The Business of Heaven

“Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures …” 1/2

“There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one” Source: That Hideous Strength

“The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express that same delight in God which made David dance” Source: Reflections on the Psalms

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury. But to forgive the …” 1/3

“What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers? Even the insane call, 'Come back,' is all for my own sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, …” 1/3