C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” Quotes (48 Quotes)




    The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

    Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists - not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.

    It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain.


    There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.

    Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards obeying the others.

    It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong, but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table.

    This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there's a rumor going around the shop that some of us are someday going to come to life.

    Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.

    My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?


    Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.


    We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.

    Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

    Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it.

    We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.

    For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

    Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. ... We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means-the only complete realist.

    We need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.

    God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger - according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way.

    Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse - so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years!

    When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.

    Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that you cannot have any real safety or happiness except in a society where every one plays fair, and it is because they see this that they try to behave decently.

    Putting on Christ'...is not one among many jobs a Christian has to do; and it is not a sort of special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all.


    Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to believe in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it.

    Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature.

    When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.

    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.

    The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.

    You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

    If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo.

    The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.

    You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

    A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.

    If you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ's body...every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who along can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be a odd way of getting him to do more work.

    The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred


    If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.

    The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.

    Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.

    It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

    The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.

    As in arithmetic-there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong; but some answers are much nearer being right than others.

    It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power -- it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.

    The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.


    More C.S. Lewis Quotations (Based on Topics)


    God - Man - World - Christianity - Love - Work & Career - Life - Mind - Religions & Spirituality - Time - Sense & Perception - Books - People - Vice & Virtue - Good & Evil - Present - Jesus Christ - Place - War & Peace - View All C.S. Lewis Quotations

    More C.S. Lewis Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - Mere Christianity
    - Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
    - Screwtape Letters
    - The Chronicles of Narnia
    - The Four Loves
    - The Great Divorce
    - The Horse and His Boy
    - The Last Battle
    - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    - The Magician's Nephew
    - The Screwtape Letters
    - The Silver Chair
    - The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    - Till We Have Faces: A Novel of Cupid and Psyche

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