Mere Christianity Quotes: Wisdom from C.S. Lewis

You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

Faith is the art of holding on to things in spite of your changing moods and circumstances.

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

In the Christian story, God descends to re-ascend.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.

Real life is not hasty. This idea of eternity is a relief, and even as we speak, you already feel it seeping in.

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.

Right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character.

Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

We are free to be real or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours.

When Christ died, he died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only person in the world.

If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible.

You don’t know how much you believe something until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death.

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love them.

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

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.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Though our feelings come and go, God’s love for us does not. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Whenever you find a man who says he doesn’t believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them.

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men.

God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.

God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created.

Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because He made us.